Hymnal by Hafizah Geter
Apples, peaches by Donald Hall
Winter Solstice by Janlori Goldman
Late December by Joe Millar
Winter Mantel by David Livewell
**
The question comes up in my mind often, about the arbitrary nature of selecting a poem for discussion. It might be because on a particular day, I happen to be thinking about something addressed in a poem, or perhaps I have just read something about the poet, recognize the name, or simply, something in the title looks appropriate for the season, as in three of the poems discussed on the last day of December, 2012, last Monday.
What is it that we seek from poems, and how do we "complete" them as readers are questions that provide a mirror for our own self-interrogations as we read.
In the case of Hymnal, the discussion among the 18 of us present, was filled with different angles about this "block of 17 lines" -- whose form was as tight and unrelentless (no stanza break, so "breathing space) as the hard smiles of the aunts.
Do we know exactly what abuse or reasons for it the speaker refers to? do we know the circumstances of the father who at age 9 held a shotgun and what exactly happened? As David pointed out, we could argue a long time about comparative evils, and pit faith against our hard core beliefs. It reminds me of "the incoherence of incoherences" -- or how faith and reason/philosophy in their very argumentation will not come to a dialogue that can make sense to either party. Some agreed that violence can only breed violence, some not, but the point of a poem is not to support a "right or wrong" way of thinking.
Why do we laugh at certain details, cringe at others, and which associations are
merely our experience pinned on to the poem as opposed to images proposed to us by the poem?
Hymnal, as title is an interesting point of departure. A collection of songs of Praise. Can it be applied to the rigid belief system confirmed each Sunday in the hard pews, the righteous beatings? The end lines, referring to the spirit,
point to some hope, and also the triumph of the writer, to go beyond such confines,
recognizing how difficult it is to break through the cover ups, self-deceptions, the pain of injustices, etc. The theme of covers: the couches in plastic, the potpourri, the smiles, the "dress like roses" -- what we do to look our best despite circumstances pulls at the details of shotgun, switches, moonshine, and the rot at the root of a family tree.
By relief, Apples, Peaches, which refers to a jump rope rhyme, is a clever imitation of pure rhyme, but substituting modern items and Twinkies and wonder bread, move on to Plague and pestilence, Unicorn sphinx, German women's name, news journals, and each mention of death, is counted in shortened space. How many seasons, months, hours, days, breaths -- until we're dead, cold, stiff, rigid, eaten by the worm.
Clever but sobering. The rhyme allows us breathing space, unlike "Hymnal" and yet, also is relentless, and we can feel the squeezing of the undeniable inevitability,
as marks of culture, history, tick us along to the ultimate end.
Janlori Goldman's "Winter Solstice is "for Jean Valentine, about whom we did not talk, except a slight reference to her as a language poet, which perhaps is reflected in the occasional wide spaces on the line. The 20 line poem has a melancholy feel from the sonics, (slow sheathing of moon in shadow; flow in ... filter out... ripped roots... a meditative flow with the repeated images of round moon, home, space of curling in and repetition of "before that" as if circling through a nostalgic recollection.
We ended with the long title of Plutzik's poem, 3 lines long, which "coupled" with the three couplets. The contrast between realistic title and elevated language of the couplets creates a space for the reader to think on omens and fact, the fragility of what could be depending on your circumstances.
And now, we speed on the first week of 2013.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
poems for December 17
Poems for December 17 : NOTE: THERE IS NO MEETING DECEMBER 24
but we will meet on December 31.
Reindeer Moss on Granite by Margaret Atwood
Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo
By intuition, Mighty Things by Emily Dickinson
Baby Villon by Philip Levine
My Cathedral by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Prophecy by W.S. Merwin
Apparently, the world is pronounced as coming to an end, again -- and Jim brought in the spread from the NY Times Sunday paper of poems addressing this. Beginnings and endings are a great topic of conversation, and the poems read aloud and shared
above, all seemed to share in an understanding of cycles and connections.
We did not have time for Linda Pastan's "Mosaic", originally slated for discussion.
Starting with Atwood, whose conceit in "Reindeer Moss" works such a tiny living thing, stanza by stanza from the large, (language is gallic -- which as John pointed out penetrated most of Europe)to smaller units. Dialect, (David mentioned Yeats on Ezra Pound's translations, "clear as if said in dialect") then syllable, and the specificity of sound. And yet, like water wearing down boulders, cliffs, mountain tops, the moss, spores as rumours (both sound, and an invisible spread of what is understood) penetrates -- perhaps an indirect hint that language too can have such an effect. The tone and spirit of the poem has an ancient feel of reverence to it,
as do the Dickenson and Longfellow poems, "Intuition asserts itself" and tall trees contain the same awe of cathedrals.
In the Dickinson poem, the question of "who asks" and "who is you" takes a back seat, to the larger idea that "mighty things" don't need justification... It feels rather like we are eavesdropping on a delightful snippet of conversation where "omnipotence lisps" and in which we "overhear" sea in the see; eye in I.
The Longfellow sonnet has perfectly embraced rhyme until the final two lines...
"...listen, ere the sound be fled,
And learn there may be worship with out words.
Almost everyone had a favorite memory of a "sacred place", a childhood outdoor space where trees arch into an architecture of sacred proportions. Carmin referred to a relative who calls himself a "blue domer", worshipping the unhampered largeness of the sky. Kathy thought of Wendell Berry's Timbered Choir.
In Philip Levine's "Baby Villon", the details evoked everything from Kristellnacht to child soldiers in Africa, outcasts and boxers. Indeed, if you google, you'll find many boxers and the dates, 1924... But the last lines "knock us out". What humanity to imagine someone, who is everyone, as brother, cousin, as self, transformed
by the pain.
Joy Harjo: "Perhaps the World Ends Here":
I love the title, which mentions end, and the opening stanza which starts with "the world begins" and the metaphor of table: what do we bring to the table? set on the table? do at the table? from "a" table, to "the" table, to a specific series of "this" table, is repeated 4 times. (as house, as starting place for war; as where we birth, and lay out the dead; sing, pray, give thanks). The 3rd and 4th stanzas refer to table as "it", what we chase away from it; what happens under it; instructions and making men/women at it-- as if to carry a larger sense of "table" as life and life's instruction manual. The middle of the poem, not only made me chuckle, but provides a reassurance about our human imperfection :
"Our dreams drink coffee with us, as they put their arms/around our children. They laugh with us at our poor/falling down selves and as we put ourselves back/together once again at the table.
Ending with Merwin, his "prophecy" demonstrates what Dogen says, "One side of your hand is in the daylight./The other side is in the dark."
So... how will the world end this December? We take each word, to understand
the sound of world, as our "year" comes to an "end" -- only to begin something,
again.
but we will meet on December 31.
Reindeer Moss on Granite by Margaret Atwood
Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo
By intuition, Mighty Things by Emily Dickinson
Baby Villon by Philip Levine
My Cathedral by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Prophecy by W.S. Merwin
Apparently, the world is pronounced as coming to an end, again -- and Jim brought in the spread from the NY Times Sunday paper of poems addressing this. Beginnings and endings are a great topic of conversation, and the poems read aloud and shared
above, all seemed to share in an understanding of cycles and connections.
We did not have time for Linda Pastan's "Mosaic", originally slated for discussion.
Starting with Atwood, whose conceit in "Reindeer Moss" works such a tiny living thing, stanza by stanza from the large, (language is gallic -- which as John pointed out penetrated most of Europe)to smaller units. Dialect, (David mentioned Yeats on Ezra Pound's translations, "clear as if said in dialect") then syllable, and the specificity of sound. And yet, like water wearing down boulders, cliffs, mountain tops, the moss, spores as rumours (both sound, and an invisible spread of what is understood) penetrates -- perhaps an indirect hint that language too can have such an effect. The tone and spirit of the poem has an ancient feel of reverence to it,
as do the Dickenson and Longfellow poems, "Intuition asserts itself" and tall trees contain the same awe of cathedrals.
In the Dickinson poem, the question of "who asks" and "who is you" takes a back seat, to the larger idea that "mighty things" don't need justification... It feels rather like we are eavesdropping on a delightful snippet of conversation where "omnipotence lisps" and in which we "overhear" sea in the see; eye in I.
The Longfellow sonnet has perfectly embraced rhyme until the final two lines...
"...listen, ere the sound be fled,
And learn there may be worship with out words.
Almost everyone had a favorite memory of a "sacred place", a childhood outdoor space where trees arch into an architecture of sacred proportions. Carmin referred to a relative who calls himself a "blue domer", worshipping the unhampered largeness of the sky. Kathy thought of Wendell Berry's Timbered Choir.
In Philip Levine's "Baby Villon", the details evoked everything from Kristellnacht to child soldiers in Africa, outcasts and boxers. Indeed, if you google, you'll find many boxers and the dates, 1924... But the last lines "knock us out". What humanity to imagine someone, who is everyone, as brother, cousin, as self, transformed
by the pain.
Joy Harjo: "Perhaps the World Ends Here":
I love the title, which mentions end, and the opening stanza which starts with "the world begins" and the metaphor of table: what do we bring to the table? set on the table? do at the table? from "a" table, to "the" table, to a specific series of "this" table, is repeated 4 times. (as house, as starting place for war; as where we birth, and lay out the dead; sing, pray, give thanks). The 3rd and 4th stanzas refer to table as "it", what we chase away from it; what happens under it; instructions and making men/women at it-- as if to carry a larger sense of "table" as life and life's instruction manual. The middle of the poem, not only made me chuckle, but provides a reassurance about our human imperfection :
"Our dreams drink coffee with us, as they put their arms/around our children. They laugh with us at our poor/falling down selves and as we put ourselves back/together once again at the table.
Ending with Merwin, his "prophecy" demonstrates what Dogen says, "One side of your hand is in the daylight./The other side is in the dark."
So... how will the world end this December? We take each word, to understand
the sound of world, as our "year" comes to an "end" -- only to begin something,
again.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Poems for December 10
Great Things Have Happened -- by Alden Nowland
Contrary Theses (II) -- Wallace Stevens
Butterfly -- Margaret Atwood
Crickets -- Margaret Atwood
Bear Lament -- Margaret Atwood
I was going to start with Rilke's sentence, “Human beings are put on Earth to experience the beauty of the Ordinary”. But opted instead, given the rather loud sounds of the set up of a Hannukkah party which surrounded 18 of us, focussed on the "how" of delivery of a poem. Would these poems be different if read silently in the total peace of your favorite place, sitting in your most favorite chair/sofa/spot on the floor/bed?
The "How" tells as much of a story as the "what". If you start a sentence with "Oh, I suppose..." this will be quite different from a declaration, well, my favorite moment in 1963 was... Just as "But of course we were lying", which drops out of the sky to make you wonder if you should try to believe the speaker, intrigued by such candid surprise, and wondering what "truth" will be told.
Alden Nowland hooks us in, and before you know it, the hinge of the present, remembering the past, folds in the middle on one sentence, ""Is that all?" I hear somebody ask." and the second part of the poem continues the 4 am-cinnamon-toast-eating-occasion, is transformed to a trip to a country never visited before, where "butter is a small adventure" -- and then comes the confirmation of the Great Thing: "except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love."
The exception, imbedded in the exception, of the unique possibility in relationships (with perhaps a raised eyebrow for the 3) and reminding us to look at what moments cry out, "this is really special, really precious."
Emily compared the advent of expecting a child to the country metaphor: You think you are going to "Italy"... but then the child is born, and it turns out it is not the sunny boot, kicking in the Mediterranean, but the North Sea and Dutch dykes...
Wonderful poem allowing reflection about expectation, context, the "how of a moment".
Stevens had a very different approach, setting up oppositions:
not only concrete and abstract, but "natural world/human", the adjective "bombastic" modifying "intimations" and a sense of humor with "martyrs a la mode; alexandrin verve, not verse; wide-moving swans. Although not an easy poem to grasp, the unexpected adjectives like "chemical" to describe the late-autumn afternoon (yellowish, like sulfur), the sonic effect of cutting "c" threads through the entire poem (chemical, mechanical, barked, park, walk, abstract, contours, cold, conclusion, chrysanthemus) with locust and bombastic containing but the cutting edge, and sibilant, the locust joining the other labials in "leaves" and "yellow".
A touch of synaesthesia, "leaves falling like notes from a piano" heightens the scene of a perfect almost winter day.
The three Atwood poems come from her book "The Door". Although you might suspect with a title like "Butterfly" there would be some sort of resurrection, here, it is a story of her 90 year father when he had the experience of seeing one as a boy, and how it transformed his life; how now, in vain, he tries to return to that time and place growing up. She matches a tercet filled with natural detail of the child's world with a tercet matching the abstract world of his work as an adult. The former is followed by the crux of the poem: It must have been an endless/
breathing in: between/
the wish to know and the need to praise/
there was no seam.
the spotting of the butterfly, such a small incident,(heard parenthetically) "shot him off on his tangent. Those who wouldn't know the logged-out bush lots might call them poverty. For him, the wanderings of his life, cannot allow him to get back to meanderings of the river that ran through his 10 mile square of home.
For Crickets, many memories came up: Pinnochio, who is reminded by Jiminy Cricket
comes in the "consciousness" of the chirpers, the idea of finding crickets on the hearth, perhaps a blessing for the heart of the home. Beautifully constructed poem with the sound of the crickets singing first, "here, here, here, here" contrasts with their being stepped on...and for those that survive, there is nothing to eat. "We have become too affluent./Inside, they’d die of hunger." Now they sing
"Wait, wait, wait, wait. But we're as cruel as the ant in Aesop's fable. We have no more hearth for them. The poem could end here:
Nevertheless, they wake us
at cold midnight,
small timid voices we can’t locate,
small watches ticking away,
cheap ones; small tin mementoes:
late, late, late, late,
but the last song carries to four more lines; bedsheets (like shrouds); bedsprings (one thinks of source; beginnings, return) and the ear now hears ghost-like heartbeats.
The final poem, "Bear Lament" sparked a lively discussion about protection of animals, poaching, Eric Good, the NY Restaurateur who gives tons of money to save tortoises (maiming the beauty of the shell to save the animal)
The poem, rife with enjambements cutting endlines as if to whip us awake, addresses
3 levels of survival: environmental, both Earth, and Species as well as our own old age. What will happen to us in all these instances?
Elaine referred to Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm.
Contrary Theses (II) -- Wallace Stevens
Butterfly -- Margaret Atwood
Crickets -- Margaret Atwood
Bear Lament -- Margaret Atwood
I was going to start with Rilke's sentence, “Human beings are put on Earth to experience the beauty of the Ordinary”. But opted instead, given the rather loud sounds of the set up of a Hannukkah party which surrounded 18 of us, focussed on the "how" of delivery of a poem. Would these poems be different if read silently in the total peace of your favorite place, sitting in your most favorite chair/sofa/spot on the floor/bed?
The "How" tells as much of a story as the "what". If you start a sentence with "Oh, I suppose..." this will be quite different from a declaration, well, my favorite moment in 1963 was... Just as "But of course we were lying", which drops out of the sky to make you wonder if you should try to believe the speaker, intrigued by such candid surprise, and wondering what "truth" will be told.
Alden Nowland hooks us in, and before you know it, the hinge of the present, remembering the past, folds in the middle on one sentence, ""Is that all?" I hear somebody ask." and the second part of the poem continues the 4 am-cinnamon-toast-eating-occasion, is transformed to a trip to a country never visited before, where "butter is a small adventure" -- and then comes the confirmation of the Great Thing: "except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love."
The exception, imbedded in the exception, of the unique possibility in relationships (with perhaps a raised eyebrow for the 3) and reminding us to look at what moments cry out, "this is really special, really precious."
Emily compared the advent of expecting a child to the country metaphor: You think you are going to "Italy"... but then the child is born, and it turns out it is not the sunny boot, kicking in the Mediterranean, but the North Sea and Dutch dykes...
Wonderful poem allowing reflection about expectation, context, the "how of a moment".
Stevens had a very different approach, setting up oppositions:
not only concrete and abstract, but "natural world/human", the adjective "bombastic" modifying "intimations" and a sense of humor with "martyrs a la mode; alexandrin verve, not verse; wide-moving swans. Although not an easy poem to grasp, the unexpected adjectives like "chemical" to describe the late-autumn afternoon (yellowish, like sulfur), the sonic effect of cutting "c" threads through the entire poem (chemical, mechanical, barked, park, walk, abstract, contours, cold, conclusion, chrysanthemus) with locust and bombastic containing but the cutting edge, and sibilant, the locust joining the other labials in "leaves" and "yellow".
A touch of synaesthesia, "leaves falling like notes from a piano" heightens the scene of a perfect almost winter day.
The three Atwood poems come from her book "The Door". Although you might suspect with a title like "Butterfly" there would be some sort of resurrection, here, it is a story of her 90 year father when he had the experience of seeing one as a boy, and how it transformed his life; how now, in vain, he tries to return to that time and place growing up. She matches a tercet filled with natural detail of the child's world with a tercet matching the abstract world of his work as an adult. The former is followed by the crux of the poem: It must have been an endless/
breathing in: between/
the wish to know and the need to praise/
there was no seam.
the spotting of the butterfly, such a small incident,(heard parenthetically) "shot him off on his tangent. Those who wouldn't know the logged-out bush lots might call them poverty. For him, the wanderings of his life, cannot allow him to get back to meanderings of the river that ran through his 10 mile square of home.
For Crickets, many memories came up: Pinnochio, who is reminded by Jiminy Cricket
comes in the "consciousness" of the chirpers, the idea of finding crickets on the hearth, perhaps a blessing for the heart of the home. Beautifully constructed poem with the sound of the crickets singing first, "here, here, here, here" contrasts with their being stepped on...and for those that survive, there is nothing to eat. "We have become too affluent./Inside, they’d die of hunger." Now they sing
"Wait, wait, wait, wait. But we're as cruel as the ant in Aesop's fable. We have no more hearth for them. The poem could end here:
Nevertheless, they wake us
at cold midnight,
small timid voices we can’t locate,
small watches ticking away,
cheap ones; small tin mementoes:
late, late, late, late,
but the last song carries to four more lines; bedsheets (like shrouds); bedsprings (one thinks of source; beginnings, return) and the ear now hears ghost-like heartbeats.
The final poem, "Bear Lament" sparked a lively discussion about protection of animals, poaching, Eric Good, the NY Restaurateur who gives tons of money to save tortoises (maiming the beauty of the shell to save the animal)
The poem, rife with enjambements cutting endlines as if to whip us awake, addresses
3 levels of survival: environmental, both Earth, and Species as well as our own old age. What will happen to us in all these instances?
Elaine referred to Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Poems for December 3
Taking the Hands -- Robert Bly
Gone & Gone by Rodney Wittwer
Here, Bullet -- by Brian Turner
A Soldier’s Arabic -- by Brian Turner
Arboretum – by Louise Glück
Benjamin Britten: Ceremony of Carols-- (excerpt: Spring Carol by William Cornish)
December is filled with secular and sacred celebrations -- I'd be pleased if you have any poems that come from traditions you would like to share.
I included an excerpt from Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols" which is based on Middle English poetry and some links so you can hear how the music surpasses the words. (It's on my mind as I'm singing the Soprano part Dec. 8th!).
If you do not know the music by Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, you can hear it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CB2JOQkRBw -- first half.
“The majority of the text is taken from The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, and is in old English. Because of this, a translation is provided as well as notes by Tom Ajack.
http://www.choralnet.org/view/222462
Note that in the middle ages, Christ’s birth was celebrated in Spring.
**
Gone are my notes from the wonderful discussion... so I will try to reconstruct an echo of the discussion. We started with looking at our hands, considering what we "cage", protect, receive, give touch, further to Bly's 5-fingered poem. Thanks to Maura who sent a follow-up picture of hands.
Wittwer's seven stanza poem uses ampersands for "and" which for some was disconcerting, for others, creating a hieroglyphic sense of mystery. The dreamlike sequence and fine use of sonics support a sense of elegy, the "we" turning to "everyone" in the final stanza, which challenges our belief that we have an idea of where we are, what we are doing, until we are "gone." Are there more than two senses of "gone" indicated in the title?
Brian Turner returns -- we started the year with "Eulogy",one of his poems from his book "Here, Bullet" published in 2005. The title poem, discussed Monday takes the bullet's message but of course, admitting that "here is where I complete the word you bring/ the way it is..." "A Soldier's Arabic" reminds me that one cannot paraphrase a good poem -- of course, one can point out from title to last word,
the pinnings of language to words, that begin and end, starting with the word for "love". It moves to how we write, English from left to right, and Arabic from right to left, and puts into question beginnings, ends, as veiled and unknown as death, written by "cursives of the wind."
Much is written now about Louise Glück. Her teacher Stanley Kunitz, remarked in 1966 about her intensity and strong voice, and since, critics have awarded adjectives such as “chilling,” “supremely reticent,” “distant,” “scrupulous. Perhaps -- but I find poems such as "The Purple Bathing Suit" and "Arboretum" point to her ironic humor that is most pleasing. To start a poem with "We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger." after the title, "Arboretum" sets up a few sparks about what it is we try to "plant for the future" or try to preserve -- or indeed, plant and then crowd out, not to mention celebrate only to find out our zeal to promote something we find attractive is invasive... The mock humor of "we asked/so little" repeated with different line-breaks and completions is highly effective,
mirrored in the ultimate question "How did we manage to do so much damage..."
In the same way, in a counter-pull is the repetition of "we were correct" which pulls at "checked", which could be countered with the repetition of desire.
The harp and two sopranos capture something beyond the words in the Benjamin Britten duet based on the Spring carol. I'll play it on 12/10.
Gone & Gone by Rodney Wittwer
Here, Bullet -- by Brian Turner
A Soldier’s Arabic -- by Brian Turner
Arboretum – by Louise Glück
Benjamin Britten: Ceremony of Carols-- (excerpt: Spring Carol by William Cornish)
December is filled with secular and sacred celebrations -- I'd be pleased if you have any poems that come from traditions you would like to share.
I included an excerpt from Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols" which is based on Middle English poetry and some links so you can hear how the music surpasses the words. (It's on my mind as I'm singing the Soprano part Dec. 8th!).
If you do not know the music by Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, you can hear it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CB2JOQkRBw -- first half.
“The majority of the text is taken from The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, and is in old English. Because of this, a translation is provided as well as notes by Tom Ajack.
http://www.choralnet.org/view/222462
Note that in the middle ages, Christ’s birth was celebrated in Spring.
**
Gone are my notes from the wonderful discussion... so I will try to reconstruct an echo of the discussion. We started with looking at our hands, considering what we "cage", protect, receive, give touch, further to Bly's 5-fingered poem. Thanks to Maura who sent a follow-up picture of hands.
Wittwer's seven stanza poem uses ampersands for "and" which for some was disconcerting, for others, creating a hieroglyphic sense of mystery. The dreamlike sequence and fine use of sonics support a sense of elegy, the "we" turning to "everyone" in the final stanza, which challenges our belief that we have an idea of where we are, what we are doing, until we are "gone." Are there more than two senses of "gone" indicated in the title?
Brian Turner returns -- we started the year with "Eulogy",one of his poems from his book "Here, Bullet" published in 2005. The title poem, discussed Monday takes the bullet's message but of course, admitting that "here is where I complete the word you bring/ the way it is..." "A Soldier's Arabic" reminds me that one cannot paraphrase a good poem -- of course, one can point out from title to last word,
the pinnings of language to words, that begin and end, starting with the word for "love". It moves to how we write, English from left to right, and Arabic from right to left, and puts into question beginnings, ends, as veiled and unknown as death, written by "cursives of the wind."
Much is written now about Louise Glück. Her teacher Stanley Kunitz, remarked in 1966 about her intensity and strong voice, and since, critics have awarded adjectives such as “chilling,” “supremely reticent,” “distant,” “scrupulous. Perhaps -- but I find poems such as "The Purple Bathing Suit" and "Arboretum" point to her ironic humor that is most pleasing. To start a poem with "We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger." after the title, "Arboretum" sets up a few sparks about what it is we try to "plant for the future" or try to preserve -- or indeed, plant and then crowd out, not to mention celebrate only to find out our zeal to promote something we find attractive is invasive... The mock humor of "we asked/so little" repeated with different line-breaks and completions is highly effective,
mirrored in the ultimate question "How did we manage to do so much damage..."
In the same way, in a counter-pull is the repetition of "we were correct" which pulls at "checked", which could be countered with the repetition of desire.
The harp and two sopranos capture something beyond the words in the Benjamin Britten duet based on the Spring carol. I'll play it on 12/10.
poems for November 26
The eyeless gene in Drosophila melanogaster – by Robert Pesach
Thanksgiving Thanks – 2009 (Robert Pesach)
Ode to the Vinyl Record by Thomas R. Smith
Advice to my self – Louise Erdrich
Yes - by Aaron Fagan
Around Us by Marvin Bell
Still by A.R. Ammons
Thank you all for the wonderful discussion! I love that we have some detail oriented folks, so now we can refer to the common fruitfly as the black-gut "friend of dew"! How special to be able to talk about what scares us, what makes an impact on us, how we use mirrors of words to see what is significant to us,
What leads us humbly to say "yes" to magnificence we might have missed.
Pesach's poem brings up GMOs, a way to look at the smallest thing and think that could be us... we’re unstable... liable to be experimented with ...
I love how a science poem can lead to a new epithet "black-gut fruitfly Friday..."
a comment about Eisenhower's presidency where he was determined not to let people know what he was thinking, a fresh look at "eye/I" where "it is easier to see in the dark and the dust -- I is difficult/
to pin down.
The Thanksgiving Thanks also turns a scientific eye past artificial intelligence and black holes to the balance of what we think we know, and the power of uncertainty to allow us to embrace immensity without knowing.
"This Knowledge that dots the darkness with Light.
This Ignorance that preserves the Wonder."
Thomas Smith's poem brought up many memories of vinyl records, the way the scra-ritch of the needle against the label at the end is used in films to create a sense of ending that doesn't end. The language captures the sounds of hearing music in this "old-fashioned" way --
"Not only the music, but
the whirlpool shimmering on the turntable
funneling blackly down into the ocean
of the ear—even the background
pops and hisses a worn record
wraps the music in, creaturely
imperfections so hospitable to our own.
and provides the image of the perfect fit of a vinyl record as cloak of flaws --
a crackling unclarity (note the sounds! So much better than the heavier syllabic "lack of clarity" -- with the associations of "un" -- as if undoing the actual playing by translating real sound to a recording played back on a vinyl disk.
Louise Erdrich's poem captures the frenzy we can enter with battling clutter.
Her humorous "Advice to myself" provides a model for all of us to create a list of what we do, and perhaps are better off not doing.
"...decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out."
Sounds so simple, and yet... and yet... some examples of avoiding inventory of the heart (just what would we find?): the way Farmhouses own the farmers... possessions possess us... how we buy/consume even if we don't need something, including eating when we're not hungry, and the fallacies around the "purpose" of stuff,
We noted line breaks, a rhythm of prayer and the density of the summary of stuff.
We closed with "Yes" -- having started the month of November with "No" --
and a discussion about "special" linked by AR Ammons' poem, "Still." Significance is how we classify what matters to us, and can lead us to appreciate magnificence which lies in all things. The dualism of "being unique" but not unique creates unresolvable tension worthy of reflection.
We did mention the easy way we praise in current society, as hypocritical as saying
"Bless your heart"... before you say anything negative...
So much more discussion revolved around these poems.
In this season of thanksgiving, I remain grateful for such a gathering of bright and thoughtful people, responding to the power of poems.
Thanksgiving Thanks – 2009 (Robert Pesach)
Ode to the Vinyl Record by Thomas R. Smith
Advice to my self – Louise Erdrich
Yes - by Aaron Fagan
Around Us by Marvin Bell
Still by A.R. Ammons
Thank you all for the wonderful discussion! I love that we have some detail oriented folks, so now we can refer to the common fruitfly as the black-gut "friend of dew"! How special to be able to talk about what scares us, what makes an impact on us, how we use mirrors of words to see what is significant to us,
What leads us humbly to say "yes" to magnificence we might have missed.
Pesach's poem brings up GMOs, a way to look at the smallest thing and think that could be us... we’re unstable... liable to be experimented with ...
I love how a science poem can lead to a new epithet "black-gut fruitfly Friday..."
a comment about Eisenhower's presidency where he was determined not to let people know what he was thinking, a fresh look at "eye/I" where "it is easier to see in the dark and the dust -- I is difficult/
to pin down.
The Thanksgiving Thanks also turns a scientific eye past artificial intelligence and black holes to the balance of what we think we know, and the power of uncertainty to allow us to embrace immensity without knowing.
"This Knowledge that dots the darkness with Light.
This Ignorance that preserves the Wonder."
Thomas Smith's poem brought up many memories of vinyl records, the way the scra-ritch of the needle against the label at the end is used in films to create a sense of ending that doesn't end. The language captures the sounds of hearing music in this "old-fashioned" way --
"Not only the music, but
the whirlpool shimmering on the turntable
funneling blackly down into the ocean
of the ear—even the background
pops and hisses a worn record
wraps the music in, creaturely
imperfections so hospitable to our own.
and provides the image of the perfect fit of a vinyl record as cloak of flaws --
a crackling unclarity (note the sounds! So much better than the heavier syllabic "lack of clarity" -- with the associations of "un" -- as if undoing the actual playing by translating real sound to a recording played back on a vinyl disk.
Louise Erdrich's poem captures the frenzy we can enter with battling clutter.
Her humorous "Advice to myself" provides a model for all of us to create a list of what we do, and perhaps are better off not doing.
"...decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out."
Sounds so simple, and yet... and yet... some examples of avoiding inventory of the heart (just what would we find?): the way Farmhouses own the farmers... possessions possess us... how we buy/consume even if we don't need something, including eating when we're not hungry, and the fallacies around the "purpose" of stuff,
We noted line breaks, a rhythm of prayer and the density of the summary of stuff.
We closed with "Yes" -- having started the month of November with "No" --
and a discussion about "special" linked by AR Ammons' poem, "Still." Significance is how we classify what matters to us, and can lead us to appreciate magnificence which lies in all things. The dualism of "being unique" but not unique creates unresolvable tension worthy of reflection.
We did mention the easy way we praise in current society, as hypocritical as saying
"Bless your heart"... before you say anything negative...
So much more discussion revolved around these poems.
In this season of thanksgiving, I remain grateful for such a gathering of bright and thoughtful people, responding to the power of poems.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
discussion of November 12
11/12/12... not quite ready for 2013!
We did start with the Tom Leonard "Jist ti Let Yi No" contrasting with the William Carlos Williams, "This is just to say" -- the two poems mirror the structure, but what a contrast in tone: the unapologetic, almost angry Dr., vs. the heartwarmingly honest beer snitcher which the Scottish accent (to me) makes even more appealing. What draws us to a poem and how to understand it? What makes a poem new?
It is surprising to stumble across a poem written in the early 19th century which can be so universal, one thinks it has just been published almost two centuries later!
So it is the case with Thomas Hood's "No!" It must have been a bad day for him, or maybe he is observing someone in an apocalyptic mood...
How different the contemporary "Last November" by Jason Miller, which in three parts gave us almost 25 minutes of discussion. First images, looking to see links, and how the verbs advance the narrative. What is it about the last line "between her teeth" that continues to gnaw at us. The final part which starts with Shakina, who lives without similes (that mark the first two parts in an irksome way) allows a re-reading of the world and the poem with her eyes, where "leaves" are potato chips, handful after handful crunching between her teeth. The paucity of her life, compared to the crab-scuttle of oaks, minnow-scatter of willow, barbed-wire vines help us rethink the world. Read the poem and enjoy the auditory effects, the different ways of imagining a war scene, a suburban scene, the nature of leaves... and the mechanical crunching, the feeling of caught, just like the paratroopers...
Job Search by Prija Keefe, a local poet, is a brilliant use of ads, of jargon and captures not only the wierdness of looking for a job, but catalogues an overtone
of what kind of jobs are out there... and would you want any of that?
Although I had to leave for the discussion of the last two poems, my question for the Nin Andrews was to ask if it was a prose poem, or simply a passage -- and would that change your feeling about it? Apparently a discussion about a bipolar girl, or typical adolescent came up. The knock-your-socks off last sentence, is haunting to me -- real enough to apply to anyone, not just the girl: "empty rooms inside her and someone hiding in every one." If we are a body, holding in spirit, what is it that
we make "room" for -- what lies in wait?
In praise of Noise certainly has music going -- and made me want to write a poem
using the rhythm of Psalm 100 -- so I did -- to allow the last line -- the song of everything -- which cannot be sung, but yet plays each day through.
We did start with the Tom Leonard "Jist ti Let Yi No" contrasting with the William Carlos Williams, "This is just to say" -- the two poems mirror the structure, but what a contrast in tone: the unapologetic, almost angry Dr., vs. the heartwarmingly honest beer snitcher which the Scottish accent (to me) makes even more appealing. What draws us to a poem and how to understand it? What makes a poem new?
It is surprising to stumble across a poem written in the early 19th century which can be so universal, one thinks it has just been published almost two centuries later!
So it is the case with Thomas Hood's "No!" It must have been a bad day for him, or maybe he is observing someone in an apocalyptic mood...
How different the contemporary "Last November" by Jason Miller, which in three parts gave us almost 25 minutes of discussion. First images, looking to see links, and how the verbs advance the narrative. What is it about the last line "between her teeth" that continues to gnaw at us. The final part which starts with Shakina, who lives without similes (that mark the first two parts in an irksome way) allows a re-reading of the world and the poem with her eyes, where "leaves" are potato chips, handful after handful crunching between her teeth. The paucity of her life, compared to the crab-scuttle of oaks, minnow-scatter of willow, barbed-wire vines help us rethink the world. Read the poem and enjoy the auditory effects, the different ways of imagining a war scene, a suburban scene, the nature of leaves... and the mechanical crunching, the feeling of caught, just like the paratroopers...
Job Search by Prija Keefe, a local poet, is a brilliant use of ads, of jargon and captures not only the wierdness of looking for a job, but catalogues an overtone
of what kind of jobs are out there... and would you want any of that?
Although I had to leave for the discussion of the last two poems, my question for the Nin Andrews was to ask if it was a prose poem, or simply a passage -- and would that change your feeling about it? Apparently a discussion about a bipolar girl, or typical adolescent came up. The knock-your-socks off last sentence, is haunting to me -- real enough to apply to anyone, not just the girl: "empty rooms inside her and someone hiding in every one." If we are a body, holding in spirit, what is it that
we make "room" for -- what lies in wait?
In praise of Noise certainly has music going -- and made me want to write a poem
using the rhythm of Psalm 100 -- so I did -- to allow the last line -- the song of everything -- which cannot be sung, but yet plays each day through.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Poems for November 12, 19. 26
No! by Thomas Hood (b. May 23, 1799 in London.)
Last November by Jason Miller
Job Search by Priya Keefe
Making the Sun Rise – by Nin Andrews
3 poems by James Arthur : In Praise of Noise; In Defense of the Semicolon;
Rapid Transit
4 poems from Aperçus 2.2 (November 2012) http://www.apercusquarterly.com/Apercus_Quarterly/Main.html
The Nightbird’s Apprentice by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Barn Owls – Jennifer Sweeney
Total Lunar Eclipse – Robert Pesich
The eyeless gene in Drosophila melanogaster – by Robert Pesach
Thanksgiving Thanks – 2009—by Steve Coffman
Last November by Jason Miller
Job Search by Priya Keefe
Making the Sun Rise – by Nin Andrews
3 poems by James Arthur : In Praise of Noise; In Defense of the Semicolon;
Rapid Transit
4 poems from Aperçus 2.2 (November 2012) http://www.apercusquarterly.com/Apercus_Quarterly/Main.html
The Nightbird’s Apprentice by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Barn Owls – Jennifer Sweeney
Total Lunar Eclipse – Robert Pesich
The eyeless gene in Drosophila melanogaster – by Robert Pesach
Thanksgiving Thanks – 2009—by Steve Coffman
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
poems for November 5
The Hurricane by William Carlos Williams
Poem in October -- by Dylan Thomas
Writing: Howard Nemerov
Sonnet #5: Shakespeare
Latin Lessons by Floyd Skloot
After Apple Picking by Robert Frost
I can't remember now why I chose these poems... Was it to contrast music, form, old and new... indeed, those are things which interest me, and the discussion today came back to Frost's essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" which talks about music and meaning and that sense of wildness we want pure. But in the end we need ideas or else all poems sound alike. I also trust a group will find meaning in a collection of poems no matter what poems come to mind.
We started with the Hurricane, well, of course, because we had Sandy which opened up many questions... just like the poem. I asked several people to read, and then to silently think about how each person would read it, and what to make of it.
How often do we lend attention to a poem this way? What do you make of the "it" in the last line: "it said, go to it." Is it the tree? the hurricane? How many ways can you say, "go to it"? is "it" Heaven, or part of the idiom, "get started". What fun to romp through two sentences and five lines and realize the game could last a long time. But, we do want to pin it down. Pin our human associations to the tree,
imagine ourselves as the "you" as easily felled as the tree, be grateful that our haven of a home was perhaps safe, and only the garage damaged, or... or...
The Dylan Thomas published in Poetry magazine in February 1945 is so filled with music and image, no matter if you prefer one to the other, there is no rivalry here.
David mentioned the form as pindaric ode and a very wordsworthian celebration of childhood...and some commented on how the music is very nice, but what's the point-- a certain impatience that is satisfied by the penultimate stanza.
Marcie pointed out that descriptions of the present (the poet's 30th birthday) are in rain, whereas his past is remembered in sun.
Whatever reason we loved this poem, we marveled at the intensity. Rich brought up whether it would be a dated poem, too rhapsodic for now-a-days -- and a musical parallel comes to mind. Why do some pieces of music never age -- maybe interpreted slightly differently in different ages, but still strike the heart?
Nemerov: David came up with the perfect sentence: This poem is about how we trace ourselves, trace our thoughts. Look at the hard C's, that reproduce the sound of the skates.
World and spirit... physical and cerebral are connected like our bones linked to nets of stars—our tiny efforts of creating symbols to something much more vast! Through writing, like the bat, we can figure out
just what our thoughts are; figure out how to communicate something larger than ourselves. What is the “point of style” – the stylus point; the reason for... and what is character – the physical form of a symbol
or temperment. How beautifully put that each of us try to understand the world, but can only understand
what we can reproduce through out hand, our thinking. Miraculous, repeated, this time to think of the world as a great writing. And with all this powerful presence and creation, we know it cannot last.
Wow! I love this poem. It is not disheartening, but an almost tender way of reminding us, for all our efforts, all our pen scratching, we will not be able to preserve a record of human presence, let alone start
to scratch the surface of understanding the large universe in which we live. And yet... this tool of writing,
this writing that writes us, this writing which leads us on journeys, is a key to something much more.
Such beautiful skill!
Shakespeare: Sonnet #5
what a sonnet! Who would have thought that "unfair" is a verb? And what about "Leese" in the final couplet? Much can be written about this early sonnet with no personal pronouns. Although we did not discuss the structure, (3 quatrains that end with a colon), the repetition of the same thing first objectively, then emotionally,
we appreciated the role of memory -- that the savoring of love is best before we forget.
Show cannot be preserved, but substance can.
Floyd Skloot: Latin Lessons -- a tour de force, where it is not clear it is an elegy at first and what leaves a mark on us.
Frost: After apple picking.
Delightful -- with unexpected surprises in line length, meter, rhyme, and how Frost can take an ordinary detail and make it apply to a larger meaning. We talked of the natural rhythms, of sleep, dream, and the fatigue of a life spent, where, even with all that red-cheeked possibility of apple, enough is enough, and next year... humbly, we accept, there will be new apples, but we understand "what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is."
As ever, I am so grateful for so many shared understandings of these poems.
PS. David shared the differences of the Frost poem with the final version:
I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight /I cannot rub the strangeness
a that was "the" and Magnified apples appear and reappear, / ... and disappear
It could be an earlier version... poems are process, metamorphosis, like apples...
Poem in October -- by Dylan Thomas
Writing: Howard Nemerov
Sonnet #5: Shakespeare
Latin Lessons by Floyd Skloot
After Apple Picking by Robert Frost
I can't remember now why I chose these poems... Was it to contrast music, form, old and new... indeed, those are things which interest me, and the discussion today came back to Frost's essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" which talks about music and meaning and that sense of wildness we want pure. But in the end we need ideas or else all poems sound alike. I also trust a group will find meaning in a collection of poems no matter what poems come to mind.
We started with the Hurricane, well, of course, because we had Sandy which opened up many questions... just like the poem. I asked several people to read, and then to silently think about how each person would read it, and what to make of it.
How often do we lend attention to a poem this way? What do you make of the "it" in the last line: "it said, go to it." Is it the tree? the hurricane? How many ways can you say, "go to it"? is "it" Heaven, or part of the idiom, "get started". What fun to romp through two sentences and five lines and realize the game could last a long time. But, we do want to pin it down. Pin our human associations to the tree,
imagine ourselves as the "you" as easily felled as the tree, be grateful that our haven of a home was perhaps safe, and only the garage damaged, or... or...
The Dylan Thomas published in Poetry magazine in February 1945 is so filled with music and image, no matter if you prefer one to the other, there is no rivalry here.
David mentioned the form as pindaric ode and a very wordsworthian celebration of childhood...and some commented on how the music is very nice, but what's the point-- a certain impatience that is satisfied by the penultimate stanza.
Marcie pointed out that descriptions of the present (the poet's 30th birthday) are in rain, whereas his past is remembered in sun.
Whatever reason we loved this poem, we marveled at the intensity. Rich brought up whether it would be a dated poem, too rhapsodic for now-a-days -- and a musical parallel comes to mind. Why do some pieces of music never age -- maybe interpreted slightly differently in different ages, but still strike the heart?
Nemerov: David came up with the perfect sentence: This poem is about how we trace ourselves, trace our thoughts. Look at the hard C's, that reproduce the sound of the skates.
World and spirit... physical and cerebral are connected like our bones linked to nets of stars—our tiny efforts of creating symbols to something much more vast! Through writing, like the bat, we can figure out
just what our thoughts are; figure out how to communicate something larger than ourselves. What is the “point of style” – the stylus point; the reason for... and what is character – the physical form of a symbol
or temperment. How beautifully put that each of us try to understand the world, but can only understand
what we can reproduce through out hand, our thinking. Miraculous, repeated, this time to think of the world as a great writing. And with all this powerful presence and creation, we know it cannot last.
Wow! I love this poem. It is not disheartening, but an almost tender way of reminding us, for all our efforts, all our pen scratching, we will not be able to preserve a record of human presence, let alone start
to scratch the surface of understanding the large universe in which we live. And yet... this tool of writing,
this writing that writes us, this writing which leads us on journeys, is a key to something much more.
Such beautiful skill!
Shakespeare: Sonnet #5
what a sonnet! Who would have thought that "unfair" is a verb? And what about "Leese" in the final couplet? Much can be written about this early sonnet with no personal pronouns. Although we did not discuss the structure, (3 quatrains that end with a colon), the repetition of the same thing first objectively, then emotionally,
we appreciated the role of memory -- that the savoring of love is best before we forget.
Show cannot be preserved, but substance can.
Floyd Skloot: Latin Lessons -- a tour de force, where it is not clear it is an elegy at first and what leaves a mark on us.
Frost: After apple picking.
Delightful -- with unexpected surprises in line length, meter, rhyme, and how Frost can take an ordinary detail and make it apply to a larger meaning. We talked of the natural rhythms, of sleep, dream, and the fatigue of a life spent, where, even with all that red-cheeked possibility of apple, enough is enough, and next year... humbly, we accept, there will be new apples, but we understand "what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is."
As ever, I am so grateful for so many shared understandings of these poems.
PS. David shared the differences of the Frost poem with the final version:
I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight /I cannot rub the strangeness
a that was "the" and Magnified apples appear and reappear, / ... and disappear
It could be an earlier version... poems are process, metamorphosis, like apples...
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Poems for October 29
A fire drill cut short our discussion of poems for October 22.
So... trying again.
The Courtesy of the Blind -- by Wislawa Szymborska
The Short Answer –John Ashbery
excerpt from an interview with John Ashbery that tells about Frank O’Hara and Auden
Why I am not a Painter – Frank O’Hara
5 i poems
**
We read again "The Courtesy of the Blind" and the discussion embraced both the poem, references to blindness ranging from Corinthians "for now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face..." and Acts, "and immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales", Amazing grace to general considerations about "the blind".
As ever, it is helpful to sort through subjective associations by close examination of the poem. Is the tone the same in the title and the penultimate stanza where it is repeated? Is there a note of irony, perhaps a comment not about the blind, but a comment about a poet who is reading to a public of blind people, and suddenly aware
of images provided in poetry -- two careful quatrains, and then an enumeration of details he'd like to skip -- but does not in two stanzas of five, much longer lines.
We don't have the original Polish, but it would be probable that the last two stanzas would resonate in the original as they do in English -- the penultimate stanza is formal as opposed to conversational (one wouldn't say" hey, great is the courtesy of the blind" and in the final stanza, we are left with the mystery of the "unseen autograph". Each participant brought a different angle which reflected a slant sense of autobiography on how each individual understood the poem --was it presumption on the part of the speaker that "blind people don't get what they can't know by sight", or enthusiastic hyperbole, or perhaps a way of looking at poetry, which is a way to bring music to language when read out loud, a way to bring an emotional connection which is beyond the "meaning" or content of images.
Just as the line "the naked stranger standing in the half-shut door" in the Szymborska poem elicited some laughter, so did many lines in the Ashbery poem for instance:
Because if it's boring //
in a different way, that'll be interesting too.
That's what I say.
In both cases, I wonder if the source of the laughter was more like having a sneak, surprise view that allows the poem to mirror a part of ourselves we might not have considered recently. Last week, after reading the Ashbery, Marcie offered the comparison of walking through a cocktail party and overhearing pieces of conversation
which gives a sense of disjointed and out of context flow. It reminded Sandra of dealing with people stricken by Alzheimers. Whether surrealistic tomfoolery, or a dream viewing reality (or it that our reality IS the dream?) there were spaces in the poem where people could hang on to a sense of understanding something. Marcie called on the quote from the Ashbery interview in the Paris Review, "I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him".
Ashbery is mindful of how he plays with us. The big question, "how do you know what is" brought forth many fine points from physicists-- "why does it appear that there is something..." "objects are just cast from other ends of the universe, the shadow is the reality"; Don referred to Freeman Dyson "What can you really know" NY Rev of
Books (11/8/12) p.18 -- a review of Jim Holt's "Why does the world
exist?: an existential detective story." John suggested that the first sentence is the short answer to the question... what is consciousness.
Perhaps to get to the "point" of the short answer, one needs to write a poem like this, which will allow meanings to mushroom, until the lightbulb goes off.
..
The next poem by O'Hara, "why I am not a painter" brought up a multitude of examples from current art and literature. Emily brought up the example from a book she is reading, and sharing a quote on how the author wrote with an artist, who said -- that's it! It is not about having a fixed idea of what you are about to create,
but shaping words and paint as they arrive. O'Hara compares this process in the poem. John brought up rage as one of the building blocks of art, to get beyond a varnished presentation of something presentable... yet aside from "terrible oranges..." the poem had little rage. Martin brought up the distinction between rage and the energy and motivation that comes with it. The poem is an art of assertion... work responds to the idea... Carmin cited the experimental GeVa where the work in progress eliminated one character. Just as the painting denied the essence of Sardines (which Mary said, she at that point had a real hankering for!)by using just giant letters... Martin: all humans have rage... not the motivation... energy... Emily ( I believe) brought up the first person who told us NO.
More on O'Hara triggers: NY School film: Painters Painting. Tom Wolfe: The Painted Word. New Art City... Untitled (movie)
(1971)
We ended by reading the 5 i poems. And what if they weren't called "i poems" --
would that change how we read them? I asked each person to pick their favorite.
So... trying again.
The Courtesy of the Blind -- by Wislawa Szymborska
The Short Answer –John Ashbery
excerpt from an interview with John Ashbery that tells about Frank O’Hara and Auden
Why I am not a Painter – Frank O’Hara
5 i poems
**
We read again "The Courtesy of the Blind" and the discussion embraced both the poem, references to blindness ranging from Corinthians "for now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face..." and Acts, "and immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales", Amazing grace to general considerations about "the blind".
As ever, it is helpful to sort through subjective associations by close examination of the poem. Is the tone the same in the title and the penultimate stanza where it is repeated? Is there a note of irony, perhaps a comment not about the blind, but a comment about a poet who is reading to a public of blind people, and suddenly aware
of images provided in poetry -- two careful quatrains, and then an enumeration of details he'd like to skip -- but does not in two stanzas of five, much longer lines.
We don't have the original Polish, but it would be probable that the last two stanzas would resonate in the original as they do in English -- the penultimate stanza is formal as opposed to conversational (one wouldn't say" hey, great is the courtesy of the blind" and in the final stanza, we are left with the mystery of the "unseen autograph". Each participant brought a different angle which reflected a slant sense of autobiography on how each individual understood the poem --was it presumption on the part of the speaker that "blind people don't get what they can't know by sight", or enthusiastic hyperbole, or perhaps a way of looking at poetry, which is a way to bring music to language when read out loud, a way to bring an emotional connection which is beyond the "meaning" or content of images.
Just as the line "the naked stranger standing in the half-shut door" in the Szymborska poem elicited some laughter, so did many lines in the Ashbery poem for instance:
Because if it's boring //
in a different way, that'll be interesting too.
That's what I say.
In both cases, I wonder if the source of the laughter was more like having a sneak, surprise view that allows the poem to mirror a part of ourselves we might not have considered recently. Last week, after reading the Ashbery, Marcie offered the comparison of walking through a cocktail party and overhearing pieces of conversation
which gives a sense of disjointed and out of context flow. It reminded Sandra of dealing with people stricken by Alzheimers. Whether surrealistic tomfoolery, or a dream viewing reality (or it that our reality IS the dream?) there were spaces in the poem where people could hang on to a sense of understanding something. Marcie called on the quote from the Ashbery interview in the Paris Review, "I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him".
Ashbery is mindful of how he plays with us. The big question, "how do you know what is" brought forth many fine points from physicists-- "why does it appear that there is something..." "objects are just cast from other ends of the universe, the shadow is the reality"; Don referred to Freeman Dyson "What can you really know" NY Rev of
Books (11/8/12) p.18 -- a review of Jim Holt's "Why does the world
exist?: an existential detective story." John suggested that the first sentence is the short answer to the question... what is consciousness.
Perhaps to get to the "point" of the short answer, one needs to write a poem like this, which will allow meanings to mushroom, until the lightbulb goes off.
..
The next poem by O'Hara, "why I am not a painter" brought up a multitude of examples from current art and literature. Emily brought up the example from a book she is reading, and sharing a quote on how the author wrote with an artist, who said -- that's it! It is not about having a fixed idea of what you are about to create,
but shaping words and paint as they arrive. O'Hara compares this process in the poem. John brought up rage as one of the building blocks of art, to get beyond a varnished presentation of something presentable... yet aside from "terrible oranges..." the poem had little rage. Martin brought up the distinction between rage and the energy and motivation that comes with it. The poem is an art of assertion... work responds to the idea... Carmin cited the experimental GeVa where the work in progress eliminated one character. Just as the painting denied the essence of Sardines (which Mary said, she at that point had a real hankering for!)by using just giant letters... Martin: all humans have rage... not the motivation... energy... Emily ( I believe) brought up the first person who told us NO.
More on O'Hara triggers: NY School film: Painters Painting. Tom Wolfe: The Painted Word. New Art City... Untitled (movie)
(1971)
We ended by reading the 5 i poems. And what if they weren't called "i poems" --
would that change how we read them? I asked each person to pick their favorite.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Poems for October 22
Poems for October 22
In the October 2012 issue of Poetry, Wiman shares his task of “reading a century” and selecting poems from the last 100 years. What makes a poem memorable – and what helps it “last”? What helps the reader to navigate a poem, enjoy the puzzles, or conversely, give up in desparation? Below is a selection of poems to test, some relatively new, reflecting new experimentation, some relatively familiar in form, although perhaps novel in scope... Read what gives you pleasure and I look forward to hearing from you!
Without a Word – Richard Wakefield
Two Translitics of Louise Labé (16th C. French love sonnet #8: translitic – an experimental form of translation)
The Courtesy of the Blind -- by Wislawa Szymborska
The Short Answer –John Ashbery
excerpt from an interview with John Ashbery that tells about Frank O’Hara and Auden
Why I am not a Painter – Frank O’Hara
5 i poems
**
The discussion was disrupted after we read the Sibyl James.
People enjoyed the Wakefield, who unlike the Washington author of the Coyote poem last week offers THE way to pronounce it, albeit with a large dose of humor. What do we put in our "lexicon" and why? What is food, what is foe? What does an animal understand about us? We discussed how do we organize reality by words but not scent and the force of syntax moving through rhyme with no commas.
A little Robert Frost imitation cum humor in the last 7 lines: "If coyotes shrug away an unconcern/he did, and took up his unhurried gait./A hundred yards away I saw him turn/his head to give a last, dismissive look,/then glide without a sound the way he came,/begrudging me the little time he took/ to find that I was nothing he need name.
The idea of translitics takes translation into a different direction. What happens to 16th century Louise Labe's sonnets in a contemporary voice. The first imitated an imitative reference, keeping the sonnet form; the second, from the book "The White Junk of Love Again" by Sibyl James concentrates on the voice of the original poet, not the form, and somewhat regarding the theme, but certainly capturing a sensual unconventionality. An example:
So don’t ask me how I am,
just hand that ragged girl in the gutter
roses, and watch her salt smile,
laughing like all that red must hurt.
the speaker's "salt smile" is a new way of saying "smile through tears";contrast of red: ragged and roses and rhyme girl/hurt.
There's a blues song feel to lines like "Love loves changes, leads me/on a leash. Some days so choked/I get beyond this ache like breathing.
the sun turns to "that hand/pulling my face close, that old heartbreak/unfolding like a creased schedule of trains.".
Interspersed in the translitics are poems which are totally original based on the overall character of the poem sequence, the Labe persona and interplay of James/Labe voices. They grow out of wanting to speak out on other side of her life than love.
But do they? For instance 05.
If I owned it, I could burn this house.
I'd tie firehoses into knots
so the water wouldn't come, let the flames
lick up like State Farm money. They'd buy
a ticket somewhere, rent any room
in any interchangeable hotel.
I'm sick of this suburban, off-the-hub-of life.
I'll rent a flat in Paris, talk literary in cafes.
I'll make my heart a map and change direction
easy as a weather-vane in love with wind.
Sunrise will bring strong London tea, half cream,
and set behind the mariachis in my plaza.
I'll love the one with dark eyes.
I'll throw camellias from my window.
I hear Beijing, Oaxaca, names
like night trains in my head,
that hard sweet rhythm like good-bye.
In the October 2012 issue of Poetry, Wiman shares his task of “reading a century” and selecting poems from the last 100 years. What makes a poem memorable – and what helps it “last”? What helps the reader to navigate a poem, enjoy the puzzles, or conversely, give up in desparation? Below is a selection of poems to test, some relatively new, reflecting new experimentation, some relatively familiar in form, although perhaps novel in scope... Read what gives you pleasure and I look forward to hearing from you!
Without a Word – Richard Wakefield
Two Translitics of Louise Labé (16th C. French love sonnet #8: translitic – an experimental form of translation)
The Courtesy of the Blind -- by Wislawa Szymborska
The Short Answer –John Ashbery
excerpt from an interview with John Ashbery that tells about Frank O’Hara and Auden
Why I am not a Painter – Frank O’Hara
5 i poems
**
The discussion was disrupted after we read the Sibyl James.
People enjoyed the Wakefield, who unlike the Washington author of the Coyote poem last week offers THE way to pronounce it, albeit with a large dose of humor. What do we put in our "lexicon" and why? What is food, what is foe? What does an animal understand about us? We discussed how do we organize reality by words but not scent and the force of syntax moving through rhyme with no commas.
A little Robert Frost imitation cum humor in the last 7 lines: "If coyotes shrug away an unconcern/he did, and took up his unhurried gait./A hundred yards away I saw him turn/his head to give a last, dismissive look,/then glide without a sound the way he came,/begrudging me the little time he took/ to find that I was nothing he need name.
The idea of translitics takes translation into a different direction. What happens to 16th century Louise Labe's sonnets in a contemporary voice. The first imitated an imitative reference, keeping the sonnet form; the second, from the book "The White Junk of Love Again" by Sibyl James concentrates on the voice of the original poet, not the form, and somewhat regarding the theme, but certainly capturing a sensual unconventionality. An example:
So don’t ask me how I am,
just hand that ragged girl in the gutter
roses, and watch her salt smile,
laughing like all that red must hurt.
the speaker's "salt smile" is a new way of saying "smile through tears";contrast of red: ragged and roses and rhyme girl/hurt.
There's a blues song feel to lines like "Love loves changes, leads me/on a leash. Some days so choked/I get beyond this ache like breathing.
the sun turns to "that hand/pulling my face close, that old heartbreak/unfolding like a creased schedule of trains.".
Interspersed in the translitics are poems which are totally original based on the overall character of the poem sequence, the Labe persona and interplay of James/Labe voices. They grow out of wanting to speak out on other side of her life than love.
But do they? For instance 05.
If I owned it, I could burn this house.
I'd tie firehoses into knots
so the water wouldn't come, let the flames
lick up like State Farm money. They'd buy
a ticket somewhere, rent any room
in any interchangeable hotel.
I'm sick of this suburban, off-the-hub-of life.
I'll rent a flat in Paris, talk literary in cafes.
I'll make my heart a map and change direction
easy as a weather-vane in love with wind.
Sunrise will bring strong London tea, half cream,
and set behind the mariachis in my plaza.
I'll love the one with dark eyes.
I'll throw camellias from my window.
I hear Beijing, Oaxaca, names
like night trains in my head,
that hard sweet rhythm like good-bye.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Poems for October 15
In the poem "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman wrote of a writer's need to embrace apparently irreconcilable points of view: "Do I contradict myself?" wrote Whitman. "Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)."
Is this a good measuring stick for a poem? We'll discuss:
Big Game -- by Brenda Shaughnessy
Coyote – by Kathleen Flennikan
Constantly Risking Absurdity -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
When Ecstasy is Inconvenient by Lorine Niedecker
two poems by Rebecca Hoogs: Self-Portrait as San Carlito
Pseudomorph
In an interview posted by Poets.org this year, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23132
Brenda Shaughnessy states that she sees the role of the
poet as someone “whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.”
Certainly, Big Game, (—after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem) captures a multi-versed world involving images of fire, memories of childhood, a nesting of images and containment. Whether fire as ideas, life, family hearth, spirit, there is something about “turning a candle inside out” that makes no sense in “real time” and yet, (not yet dead, yet dead) the image of getting to the heart of the candle, the wick of things seems clear. The clichés and rhyming, the small aside of the ripped paper bags provided momentary distraction, but the ending line points out how we do “live in our heads”, not necessarily aware of what plays at the edge of shadows.
Coyote, by contrast, was a very accessible poem, although not simple. How are we defined? by linguistics, pronunciation, region, our reputation? What is that part of ourselves we cannot name – and if unnameable, what is our relation to it? The use of “I” and “you” is open enough to allow several interpretations – “you” as name, in one place,
and name in another – who is “you”? “You live outside language or memory” is followed by “changing your name” and “interchangeable homes” laced by the strong words: abandon, betrayal. At the end, “ I am become you” supports “change”. Crafting delights include the enjambment of “gaze” after the sibilant of ‘silver, slope-shouldered form” which support images cast upon the coyote as outcast, not trusted. And yet, who has betrayed what in terms of building cities?
Because we enjoyed Ferlinghetti’s “Dog” last week so much, another from “Coney Island of the Mind”, “Constantly Risking Absurdity” mimics in form, the balancing act involved
with the creative process. What better description of poet than acrobat in these lines:
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
the double p’s, t’s, st’s, d’s balance the actions of the “supposed advance” (starts and ends with “s” sounds) towards Beauty (doubling the “ty” with gravity) who also embraces risk – and there is no guarantee the poet will catch her.
Although the risk taking is told in a clownish way and reminded people of "Send in the Clowns" (song by Stephen Sondheim from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer ...) the subject itself is far from playful.
“When Ecstasy is Inconvenient” by Lorine Niedecker is an equally intriguing title, followed by three rather enigmatic stanzas which cause a long pause whistling “so...”
until one remembers that Niedecker in the poem last week was explaining her work of “condensing”. Given the “wildfire” of ecstasy, we thought of both Shaughnessy and the Ferlighetti, which could be reduced to “metapoems” – that inspiration, like madness
sketched by the only adverb in the poem, “amazedly” must be contained, held in. David noted it contrasted well with Emily Dickinson’s inebriation in “I taste a liquor never brewed”. I brought up Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) who stated that it is in the pause between the stimulus and our response that we make our choice.
In the last stanza, it is the poet who chooses to embrace the madness, where “keep” it
has a double entendre: both safeguarded, but also contained as if within a castle keep.
The Linda Pastan poem allows a long pause between the question in the title
and what we called “the zapper” or the restatement of the title, where the understanding of “dark” is equated with sadness, arrived at only by considering the moon, the white and black of creation, crows, ebony. Our discussion remarked on the patient dialogue with the title, with associations with the gibbous moon where you can see the dark part, and Elaine’s memory of seeing the moon, (as witness in the poem) as
a wide-mouthed face looking aghast.
The two Rebecca Hoogs poems were delightful, and seemed to explore the process of writing, the fear of not having anything meaningful to say. Do you know where San Carlito is? Is that where writers go when they feel writer’s block? Or is it simply Self-Portrait as ...a sacred place? Like Ray Bradbury’s electronic bees in “Fahrenheit 451” the repetition of “um” the summons and refutation of being summed up, create “seashell-ear-thimbles” with homonyms, slant rhyme.
The second poem by Hoogs, Pseudomorph, seems to be also a self-portrait, like the second wife of the mysterious Rebecca in du Maurier’s mystery novel. Marvellous plays on language, with the b’s of beak, bubble, blurry, so-so-blurb on the back of a book,
which wrap like octopus arms on the “thin skin” of wearing a name and being in the thankless position of ink-tank without a think.
We left, feeling the gratitude resulting from good discussion, which allows a closer read,
and appreciation for the complexity of the poems.
Is this a good measuring stick for a poem? We'll discuss:
Big Game -- by Brenda Shaughnessy
Coyote – by Kathleen Flennikan
Constantly Risking Absurdity -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
When Ecstasy is Inconvenient by Lorine Niedecker
two poems by Rebecca Hoogs: Self-Portrait as San Carlito
Pseudomorph
In an interview posted by Poets.org this year, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23132
Brenda Shaughnessy states that she sees the role of the
poet as someone “whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.”
Certainly, Big Game, (—after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem) captures a multi-versed world involving images of fire, memories of childhood, a nesting of images and containment. Whether fire as ideas, life, family hearth, spirit, there is something about “turning a candle inside out” that makes no sense in “real time” and yet, (not yet dead, yet dead) the image of getting to the heart of the candle, the wick of things seems clear. The clichés and rhyming, the small aside of the ripped paper bags provided momentary distraction, but the ending line points out how we do “live in our heads”, not necessarily aware of what plays at the edge of shadows.
Coyote, by contrast, was a very accessible poem, although not simple. How are we defined? by linguistics, pronunciation, region, our reputation? What is that part of ourselves we cannot name – and if unnameable, what is our relation to it? The use of “I” and “you” is open enough to allow several interpretations – “you” as name, in one place,
and name in another – who is “you”? “You live outside language or memory” is followed by “changing your name” and “interchangeable homes” laced by the strong words: abandon, betrayal. At the end, “ I am become you” supports “change”. Crafting delights include the enjambment of “gaze” after the sibilant of ‘silver, slope-shouldered form” which support images cast upon the coyote as outcast, not trusted. And yet, who has betrayed what in terms of building cities?
Because we enjoyed Ferlinghetti’s “Dog” last week so much, another from “Coney Island of the Mind”, “Constantly Risking Absurdity” mimics in form, the balancing act involved
with the creative process. What better description of poet than acrobat in these lines:
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
the double p’s, t’s, st’s, d’s balance the actions of the “supposed advance” (starts and ends with “s” sounds) towards Beauty (doubling the “ty” with gravity) who also embraces risk – and there is no guarantee the poet will catch her.
Although the risk taking is told in a clownish way and reminded people of "Send in the Clowns" (song by Stephen Sondheim from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer ...) the subject itself is far from playful.
“When Ecstasy is Inconvenient” by Lorine Niedecker is an equally intriguing title, followed by three rather enigmatic stanzas which cause a long pause whistling “so...”
until one remembers that Niedecker in the poem last week was explaining her work of “condensing”. Given the “wildfire” of ecstasy, we thought of both Shaughnessy and the Ferlighetti, which could be reduced to “metapoems” – that inspiration, like madness
sketched by the only adverb in the poem, “amazedly” must be contained, held in. David noted it contrasted well with Emily Dickinson’s inebriation in “I taste a liquor never brewed”. I brought up Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) who stated that it is in the pause between the stimulus and our response that we make our choice.
In the last stanza, it is the poet who chooses to embrace the madness, where “keep” it
has a double entendre: both safeguarded, but also contained as if within a castle keep.
The Linda Pastan poem allows a long pause between the question in the title
and what we called “the zapper” or the restatement of the title, where the understanding of “dark” is equated with sadness, arrived at only by considering the moon, the white and black of creation, crows, ebony. Our discussion remarked on the patient dialogue with the title, with associations with the gibbous moon where you can see the dark part, and Elaine’s memory of seeing the moon, (as witness in the poem) as
a wide-mouthed face looking aghast.
The two Rebecca Hoogs poems were delightful, and seemed to explore the process of writing, the fear of not having anything meaningful to say. Do you know where San Carlito is? Is that where writers go when they feel writer’s block? Or is it simply Self-Portrait as ...a sacred place? Like Ray Bradbury’s electronic bees in “Fahrenheit 451” the repetition of “um” the summons and refutation of being summed up, create “seashell-ear-thimbles” with homonyms, slant rhyme.
The second poem by Hoogs, Pseudomorph, seems to be also a self-portrait, like the second wife of the mysterious Rebecca in du Maurier’s mystery novel. Marvellous plays on language, with the b’s of beak, bubble, blurry, so-so-blurb on the back of a book,
which wrap like octopus arms on the “thin skin” of wearing a name and being in the thankless position of ink-tank without a think.
We left, feeling the gratitude resulting from good discussion, which allows a closer read,
and appreciation for the complexity of the poems.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Imagism
Poetry based on description (image) rather than theme... worked with condensing image to capture the energy behind an ordinary object, a scene, or how we see a scene, or meta-poem opened up new ways of writing.
I'm enjoying Al Filreis' course, and today shared what I learned about the imagists.
At the same time, writing a highly personal poem filled with emotion, perhaps spiced by vernacular speech has a ring of truth that the "cerebral" mind-set of imagism discards for a spare, hard and clear language.
Emily Dickinson would say, self is nomadic, each poem containing several selves,
but what is this self?
And how does one bring a personal experience to a universal level?
**
I enjoyed meeting with Borderliners today, all 10 of us present to share poems and I had offered to give a 10 minute presentation on Imagism based on what I have learned from Filreis and using some of his examples:
Sea Rose by H.D.
The Encounter by Ezra Pound
Grandfather (advised me) by Lorine Niedecker
Imagine now, the shared 10 minutes,
4.5 minutes: H.D.: people read "Sea Rose". I presented semantics of sound, as in "stint of petals"
or "drip such acrid fragrance"; the multiple correspondences; the way the rose is not a cliche in multiple, overused bathrobes, but an autobiography of style; motion vs. stasis, a spotlight on negative adjectives, the anaphor coupled with passive verbs:
you are caught; you are flung; you are lifted...with a cubist effect. Concrete image with invigorated language... energized. How the form condenses in the final stanza.
2.5 minutes: Ezra Pound: people read "The Encounter". Showed me the handshake and shared how it feels. a five line story, I, incapable of doing; She daring. Irony of "new" morality and "talking the talk" which is as empty as the "old".
3 minutes: Lorinne Niedecker: people read. pointed out syllable count of each line, how no line exceeds 4 syllables, so the pigden English 2nd stanza line 2 cannot have an article, possessive or even "this". How the layout of the poem is not condensed, but filled with white space and no period at the end -- a lifework of the creative process, so different from the stacked 3 syllable sound of Grandfather's advice. Lorine's 3 syllable work "and condense" is what she continues to learn.
Phew!
I made up a little quiz on Ezra Pound: shared Filreis' comments on "In a station of the Metro"
there is no cause and effect but the immediacy of pink spots of beauty on black.
Do check out this Modern Contemporary Poetry course! I've enjoyed immensely the two writing assignments so far, the quizzes, the sense of participating in the videos.
30,000 people are involved, which is staggering, and yet not.
https://class.coursera.org/modernpoetry/wiki/view?page=syllabus
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
poems for Oct. 8
We will start out discussion with Big Game -- by Brenda Shaughnessy
—after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem" ( I copy it below)
(*http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikelevin/3884546393/
(Turn a candle inside out
and you’ve got the smallest
portion of a lion standing
there at the edge of the
Shadows)
1. Cid Corman: 5 short poems (about a minute in length TOTAL! )
We aren’t even lost
Assistant
The Coming of Age
It isn’t for want
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Corman.php : Look for the titles under A separate set features six more of Corman's poems:
2. Lorine Niedecker: Grandfather advised me
3. Dog by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
4. Gray Room by Wallace Stevens
5. Young Woman at a Window, William Carlos Williams
A look at imagism, thanks to Al Filreis' course on Modern Contemporary Poetry.
What imagist principles do these poems share? Listening to Cid Corman, you can HEAR the importance of the voice choosing how to accent words, but in general, sonics are not the concern of the Imagists. Rather, the structure of the form mirrors the ideas in the imagist manifesto: exact words, not decorative; new cadences; emphasis on particulars, and hard, clean vocabulary and condensation, freedom for choice of subject...
**
Cid Corman: Small poems = lengthy conversations! We wondered if the five poems (we listened to Enuresis as well) were not rather one poem, each one continuing a snapshot thought. Eunuresis: John had the idea of parents as "twin towers" provoking a terrorist reaction... or perhaps the image of the Tower of Babel -- something we seek to build to reach beyond our selves... which could fit a responses of wondering what parts we show. What is puzzling is the opening statement, "we aren't even lost" juxtaposed with the impossibility of being found. Carmin commented that "found/ down" stabilizes idea that tree is calm, but we aren’t.. Where are we? Who are we compared to visible trees rooted in one place? From there, we sprang into a discussion including the idea of humans as souls, lost sheep, and Auden's view that a poem is not about ending on one resulting meaning.
Not having seen the poems, the line breaks on all of them could be after 5 syllables.
In the case of the first one, it would be 5 lines of 5. The next one, "turn the page" picks up the idea of "retrieving the leaf". Jim helped us remember that syllable counts will be different in the South -- if you say "then" (I realized then -- line 4 of "Coming of Age" ) you have 2 + syllables in "then"... re-e-al-i-e-z'd has 6... The almost zen-like message of "be here, be in the now" is not about living in the past, winning/losing but what we stand to lose if we aren't in touch with who we ARE. "It isn't for want" addresses both desire, or need, as well as addressing the words we say, the important words, the words WE think are important for the OTHER, expressed by "You" (and who is you?), and the poem hinges on the BUT.
What is this relationship we want to hang on to -- and what is the difference between stressing YOU vs. ARE... the more you think about it, the richer it gets, and the harder it is to find the words to express it. For Cid, the urgency is not about the form or the content, or self-expression. What’s important is connection and response back "I can only be here, if you are here.
Niedecker on the other hand makes her point -- the looping endlessness of form, to talk about her work of condensing. Grandfather's regularity in 3 syllable lines; the response "I learned" in 2 syllables, implying a larger complement of what "it" is; the missing article in "to sit at desk". Mention was made how in British English one can say "in hospital"... many of us enjoyed her humor-- for instance -- for the trade she’s learning – no lay off.
Dog, by Ferlinghetti is a delightful demonstration of how a poem can start off in a regular pace with a lined up starting place each line, like a dog on a leash, which eventually disintegrates into fragmented lines describing the "real live / barking / democratic dog!
A connection with Bob Dylan in 1970, perhaps? http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/if-dogs-run-free; if you don't understand me, am I talking to myself? and how bees depend on each other as a social unit to survive.
The Gray Room is a Stevens gem with a killer last lines, whose telling line is not characteristic of him. The poem works like an elegant still life and the power of stillness; one imagines an oriental fan, and John brought up Yasunari Kawagata
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasunari_Kawabata, the Japanese 1968 Nobel Prize writer.
We will start next week with the Shaughnessy as not everyone had the copy with them.
—after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem" ( I copy it below)
(*http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikelevin/3884546393/
(Turn a candle inside out
and you’ve got the smallest
portion of a lion standing
there at the edge of the
Shadows)
1. Cid Corman: 5 short poems (about a minute in length TOTAL! )
We aren’t even lost
Assistant
The Coming of Age
It isn’t for want
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Corman.php : Look for the titles under A separate set features six more of Corman's poems:
2. Lorine Niedecker: Grandfather advised me
3. Dog by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
4. Gray Room by Wallace Stevens
5. Young Woman at a Window, William Carlos Williams
A look at imagism, thanks to Al Filreis' course on Modern Contemporary Poetry.
What imagist principles do these poems share? Listening to Cid Corman, you can HEAR the importance of the voice choosing how to accent words, but in general, sonics are not the concern of the Imagists. Rather, the structure of the form mirrors the ideas in the imagist manifesto: exact words, not decorative; new cadences; emphasis on particulars, and hard, clean vocabulary and condensation, freedom for choice of subject...
**
Cid Corman: Small poems = lengthy conversations! We wondered if the five poems (we listened to Enuresis as well) were not rather one poem, each one continuing a snapshot thought. Eunuresis: John had the idea of parents as "twin towers" provoking a terrorist reaction... or perhaps the image of the Tower of Babel -- something we seek to build to reach beyond our selves... which could fit a responses of wondering what parts we show. What is puzzling is the opening statement, "we aren't even lost" juxtaposed with the impossibility of being found. Carmin commented that "found/ down" stabilizes idea that tree is calm, but we aren’t.. Where are we? Who are we compared to visible trees rooted in one place? From there, we sprang into a discussion including the idea of humans as souls, lost sheep, and Auden's view that a poem is not about ending on one resulting meaning.
Not having seen the poems, the line breaks on all of them could be after 5 syllables.
In the case of the first one, it would be 5 lines of 5. The next one, "turn the page" picks up the idea of "retrieving the leaf". Jim helped us remember that syllable counts will be different in the South -- if you say "then" (I realized then -- line 4 of "Coming of Age" ) you have 2 + syllables in "then"... re-e-al-i-e-z'd has 6... The almost zen-like message of "be here, be in the now" is not about living in the past, winning/losing but what we stand to lose if we aren't in touch with who we ARE. "It isn't for want" addresses both desire, or need, as well as addressing the words we say, the important words, the words WE think are important for the OTHER, expressed by "You" (and who is you?), and the poem hinges on the BUT.
What is this relationship we want to hang on to -- and what is the difference between stressing YOU vs. ARE... the more you think about it, the richer it gets, and the harder it is to find the words to express it. For Cid, the urgency is not about the form or the content, or self-expression. What’s important is connection and response back "I can only be here, if you are here.
Niedecker on the other hand makes her point -- the looping endlessness of form, to talk about her work of condensing. Grandfather's regularity in 3 syllable lines; the response "I learned" in 2 syllables, implying a larger complement of what "it" is; the missing article in "to sit at desk". Mention was made how in British English one can say "in hospital"... many of us enjoyed her humor-- for instance -- for the trade she’s learning – no lay off.
Dog, by Ferlinghetti is a delightful demonstration of how a poem can start off in a regular pace with a lined up starting place each line, like a dog on a leash, which eventually disintegrates into fragmented lines describing the "real live / barking / democratic dog!
A connection with Bob Dylan in 1970, perhaps? http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/if-dogs-run-free; if you don't understand me, am I talking to myself? and how bees depend on each other as a social unit to survive.
The Gray Room is a Stevens gem with a killer last lines, whose telling line is not characteristic of him. The poem works like an elegant still life and the power of stillness; one imagines an oriental fan, and John brought up Yasunari Kawagata
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasunari_Kawabata, the Japanese 1968 Nobel Prize writer.
We will start next week with the Shaughnessy as not everyone had the copy with them.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
poems for October 1
Celebration by Denise Levertov- (October 24, 1923 – December 20, 1997)
Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain by Louis Simpson (1923-2012)
The President Flies Over by Patricia Smith (b. 1955- )
Enuresis by Cid Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004)
Fado by Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953 --) (Fado: A type of popular Portuguese song, usually with a melancholy theme and accompanied by mandolins or guitars.)
Big Game -- by Brenda Shaughnessy (b. 1970- )
A sampler of poems that echo Dickinson's formal "ecstasy" and Whitman's exhuberance from last week; a glance at modernist technique...
I couldn’t help smiling at Levertov’s brilliance – the musical images – the “exceptional”expressed as youthful (green, young virtuoso, prodigy), how the wind provides an oceanic chant,
and all is light, song and sacred, with a touch of Wales providing a backdrop contrast of “reasonable gloom”... It tickles the heart with a gladness of being! Enviable writing! We’re just entering the energetic days of Fall – where the “sh” of shadows contrasts the sound of the other “sh”words (sharpest/oceanic/shine/impatient) which are far from any hush – rather, part of the bright, brassy song such brilliance plays. A great poem to read to snap one’s thoughts to gratitude for living! David pointed out the form as an inverted sonnet -- the volta arriving in the split line after the sestet, where on the 8th line one arrives at "blessing" and the festive rite. A poem evoking "how Green was my Valley" -- the excitement of a Welsh "Breakout" when everything stops, to celebrate the sudden arrival of sun.
Simpson's poem seems a reverse celebration, contrasting Whitman's statue, and memory of Walt's exuberance with the parts of America we might prefer to ignore -- "used car lots", and fatigue of "light sick to death"and our fate, just like Greece and Rome,
is the future in ruins. The two exclamation points, after "cancelled" and ruins,
scissor in an extra shadow of irony, and turn to the final stanza where we can imagine red. We discussed these lines at length as well as "the housewife who knows she's dumb". Dumb, as mute? as the "advertisement" of the myth of the ideal blond,
just as Walt did not "prophesise" but "advertise" ? Note how Simpson speaks for all poets, through Walt, happy at being found out, -- comfortable with the image of
"a crocodile in wrinkled metal" -- loafing -- as if to equate the role of the poet
to be the sly and dangerous animal lying in wait for the red of revolution --
is Italy, the country in the shape of the boot, dancing on Greece? the angel at the gate, perhaps ready to cast out Adam and Eve, imagines red, as Nancy pointed out, a stronger red than that actually painted, a red that has not happened yet -- leaving the reader to imagine what that might be.
David Michael offered a reference to Robinson Jeffers: we’re really ruining things – it will be OK if we get rid of people. Martin offered the optimism of seeing nature blossoming again in Chernobyl...
The Patricia Smith poem is one of a collection about hurricane Katrina, in her book, "Blood Dazzler" but the beauty of her poem is that it could be any President "flying over" -- passing by, one of
"My flyboys memorize flip and soar.
They’ll never swoop real enough
to resurrect that other country,
won’t ever get close enough to give name
to tonight’s dreams darkening the water.
**
It isn't only the president.. but all of us are at risk for memorizing "flip and soar"... how to turn away from the "other" and soar towards what looks to be "heaven". The discussion revolved around the 1% who are gaining by an astronomical
600%, leaving others behind... the hurricane is like a huge water balloon/elephant,
the last line in the poem " I understand that somewhere it has rained."
equivalent to reporting on a second hand report of the elephant, without ever naming it from trunk to tail. How do we respond to catastrophe? Do we reduce it to a report of rain? a rhetorical turn?
Cid Corman's Enuresis captures a different response to this being human
that of a child fearing punishment, and witnessing the "I am" in the terrible "slam" of the parents fighting. It made us grateful that we didn't have such catastrophe.
Jane Hirschfield's Fado, takes an approach, that embraces the magic of possibility with the hardship of reality. The prestidigitator (quick fingered magician) produces a dove from the quarter behind the girl's ear, and such amazement (comparing the two) then moves to another "half-stopped moment" to a woman in Portugal singing a Fado that balances, like copper bowls, the living with the song. Seamless mastery!
We read the Shaughnessy, but will discuss it next week!
Carmin sent me this afterwards: it reflected our discussion!
"There were a few references in today's poems of finding beauty where you are - a coal-dusty village, singing woman in wheelchair in Portugal, Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain angel in the gate, flowering plum, dances etc.
Though Luis Albert Urrea's books often are in a setting of poverty, displaced people, discrimination, with sometimes vulgar and ugly settings, he seems to find beauty in the people and places. One of my bookclub friends didn't like INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH - "too many smells, too many fluids", she said. While this is true, lots of smells and fluids, how can it be otherwise with the people and locations he writes about?"
The following is from DOMPE DAYS, a short story in the book, BY THE LAKE OF SLEEPING CHILDREN.
Imagine this: a muscular storm came in during the last days, and as we drove into the Tijuana dump, we were greeted by an apocalyptic scene. Let me try to describe it. The dump, as you know, is cheek by jowl with the rangy home-built cemetery. In fact, many of the graves are partially covered by trash. The garbage used to be in the canyon about 150 feet deep; it is now a hill about 40 feet high. Above this hill is a seething crown of 10,000 gulls, crows, pigeons. But mostly gulls. Imagine, further, mud. Running yellow mud; brown, reddish, black wastewater mixed with dust, ashes and clay. The few graves with cement slabs over them glisten with the rain. The mud is a gray so dark it verges on black. The sky is raging. Knots of clouds speed east, far above the gulls, and the gulls rise so high that they seem an optical illusion; from the huge birds to nearly invisible specks in the sky, they seem to hang on wires, a mad museum display, held in place by the violent wind.
Now we drive in, and the muddy graves are pale blue and pale green and pale brown as their wooden crosses fade; the cement headstones are all white or streaked rainy gray. And from the hill of trash, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plastic bags -- tan bags, blue bags, white supermarket bags, black trash bags, yellow bread wrappers and video store bags -- book paper, newspapers open like wings, ribbons of toilet paper, tissues like dancing moths, even half-dead balloons, are caught in the backdraft and are rising and falling in vast slow waves behind the hill, slow motion, a ballet in the air of the parti-colored landscape, looking like special effects, like some art department's million-dollar creation, Lucifer's lava lamp, silent ghostly, stately, for half a mile, turning in the air, rolling, looping.
And up top, exposed to the elements, the garbage is flying like a snowstorm.
........about 40 pages later he writes: There was nothing left here. Not a voice. I felt watched by shadows as I climbed out, hurried away from the traces of sorrow downwind of the city.
She concluded, "The phrases "optical illusion", "mad museum display", "some art department's million-dollar creation", "Lucifer's lava lamp" fit so well with the scene. I guess this is a pretty eerie beauty but maybe better than seeing only the dump."
I agree.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
poems for Sept. 24
A Supermarket in California – Allen Ginsberg
Whitman at Armory Square -- by M.C. Allan (published by Linebreak, Sept. 17)
a few lines from Whitman, Song of Myself
I taste a liquor never brewed -- Emily Dickinson
Spring and Fall – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Cello - by Dorianne Laux
Porch Swing in September by Ted Kooser
Inspired by the Filreis Modern Contemporary Poetry, a quick look at our American modernist stage-setters: how are they still alive? Does rhyme stop us from singing "all truths (that) wait in things" -- what makes a poem "successful" for you? Do you have expectations or come with an empty mind? When you make associations, are there judgements involved? Just as representational painting shows us something we might see and recognize, words paint both physical (sensory) and emotional experience.
How do such diverse poets do this-- and what contexts and philosophy do they reveal in so doing?
**
The first two poems reflect the ever-reaching influences of Whitman. As I shared with those present on 9/24, I am enjoying thoroughly the free on-line course offered by Al Filreis, U Penn, and faculty advisor of the Kelly center, called “Mod-Po” or Modern Contemporary American Poetry. (To see the endless FREE courses on-line: Re: https://www.coursera.org/courses
To see the Mod-Poetry course: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
Whitman’s exhuberance can feel arrogant, until you consider his “democratic” understanding that we all have access to “truth” which waits in things. “In all people I see myself – none more and not one barleycorn and the fool less, and the good or bad, I say of myself, I say of them.” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass). He identifies with a collective self, becomes the voice-piece of America in this role,
singing the vitality of a new nation. His enumerations, capturing the “blab of the pave”, his almost overwhelming celebration of the sensory and sensual self, opened a door for poetry, loosened from strict meter and rhyme, and nourished by experience, not thoughts.
Ginsberg captures the spirit – starting with the nourishment of supermarket, which spills into his own “blab of the pave” including Lorca by the watermelons. Almost a century later, Whitman is called “a lonely old grubber” which is a sharp contrast from what one called Whitman’s “playful lechery”. “Which way does your beard point tonight” in the penultimate stanza has a “we” which could be Ginsberg and Walt, or a larger we. The role of pronouns in Ginsberg’s poem allow an open-ness, characteristic of modern poetry to be more than one thing: “we” as reference to gay men/ gay people or a larger collective, including the reader...
The final image gives due homage to Whitman as “courage-teacher”, and leaves us with the finality of death... our own, and that of our country Whitman had once sung with such celebration. Which bank is smoking? The one of the living or the dead? And we are reminded of the river of forgetfulness, the final word, “Lethe”.
Certainly questions remain: what meanings does Ginsberg ascribe to the lost America of love? And you, the reader?
The next poem by M.C. Allen we read with Elaine reading the regular type, and the rest of us reading the italics as a chorus. The form of the poem could be a collage of two poems, the regular type as one, the italics as another, drawing on Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser”, although not quite. Chilling reminder of the Civil war, but also of the need for healing. Because the poem is a collage, open-ness of interpretation is not limited to a sexualizing of Whitman, but a more general call on his long-lined, confident poetry which can uplift the spirit, and a celebration of writing. Perhaps the threading of what was this way, is a reminder of what continues in the voice of the wounded.
The Dickinson poem uses an economy of meter, rhyme, a breathlessness of dashes which hint at what is not spoken, shifting metaphor, to fully embrace an earthly experience which transports the spirit. We discussed the capitalization of certain nouns, as one does in German, and the hymn-like rhyhms, where the beats alternate from 8 syllables to 6, except for the “tippled” penultimate line. Informed by Emerson, Emily’s introspection brings her to imagine a world of possibilities which leaves the reader to discover. Marcie summed it up as the “Omigod – sex with the air” on one of those days one feel exhilarated by the energy of a beautiful day. Emily spoke of a program in which experts have determined that Emily was quite the lush and “hit the bars of Amherst” at night.
There’s so much more to know about a person – such as the “meaning” of dashes rising up, or slanting down – all we can trust is the poem itself and the clues it provides.
On a personal note, I thoroughly enjoyed writing an essay on this charming poem, and reading other students’ essays as part of the Filreis course.
The Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall” was missing the final line:
“It is Margaret you mourn for” and some of the accent marks.
We agreed that wanwood would be “pale” wood and thought of the physical fall,
(Goldengrove, leafmeal, colder) juxtaposed with the fresh innocence of Margaret—
can one grieve loss in such a state? Perhaps the greatest loss, David suggested implied in the word “blight” is Man’s fall from grace, symbolized by being cast out of the Garden of Eden. We do not grieve that as much as watching a Margaret change from child to suffering adult.
Dorianne’s poem, Cello is a true chef-d’oeuvre. Three sentences, 2 ½ lines , 5 ½ lines, 7 ½ lines long. The lengthening of the lines of the repeated adjectives in “ish”, the accumulative sounds of the “dead music” juxtaposed with the “rosined bow sound of the living”. Like Hopkins’ “heart heard... ghost guessed”, it is up to us to shoulder our losses and departed loved ones.
Kooser’s sonnet, “Porch Swing in September” allows us to admire the detail of a spider’s work in the fulcrum of man-made swing and seasons, wind. The intricacy of each “world” is caught with sounds of wood, “soft vibrations of moths/the wasp tapping....”
I can’t think of a spider at work in morning on her dew-jeweled web without imagining
“time for the cool dewdrops to brush from her work” – each one reflecting both itself, the worlds we don’t usually see, and the web. Perfect imagery without any artifice that captures the sense of the ephemeral without hounding the reader about change.
Whitman at Armory Square -- by M.C. Allan (published by Linebreak, Sept. 17)
a few lines from Whitman, Song of Myself
I taste a liquor never brewed -- Emily Dickinson
Spring and Fall – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Cello - by Dorianne Laux
Porch Swing in September by Ted Kooser
Inspired by the Filreis Modern Contemporary Poetry, a quick look at our American modernist stage-setters: how are they still alive? Does rhyme stop us from singing "all truths (that) wait in things" -- what makes a poem "successful" for you? Do you have expectations or come with an empty mind? When you make associations, are there judgements involved? Just as representational painting shows us something we might see and recognize, words paint both physical (sensory) and emotional experience.
How do such diverse poets do this-- and what contexts and philosophy do they reveal in so doing?
**
The first two poems reflect the ever-reaching influences of Whitman. As I shared with those present on 9/24, I am enjoying thoroughly the free on-line course offered by Al Filreis, U Penn, and faculty advisor of the Kelly center, called “Mod-Po” or Modern Contemporary American Poetry. (To see the endless FREE courses on-line: Re: https://www.coursera.org/courses
To see the Mod-Poetry course: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
Whitman’s exhuberance can feel arrogant, until you consider his “democratic” understanding that we all have access to “truth” which waits in things. “In all people I see myself – none more and not one barleycorn and the fool less, and the good or bad, I say of myself, I say of them.” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass). He identifies with a collective self, becomes the voice-piece of America in this role,
singing the vitality of a new nation. His enumerations, capturing the “blab of the pave”, his almost overwhelming celebration of the sensory and sensual self, opened a door for poetry, loosened from strict meter and rhyme, and nourished by experience, not thoughts.
Ginsberg captures the spirit – starting with the nourishment of supermarket, which spills into his own “blab of the pave” including Lorca by the watermelons. Almost a century later, Whitman is called “a lonely old grubber” which is a sharp contrast from what one called Whitman’s “playful lechery”. “Which way does your beard point tonight” in the penultimate stanza has a “we” which could be Ginsberg and Walt, or a larger we. The role of pronouns in Ginsberg’s poem allow an open-ness, characteristic of modern poetry to be more than one thing: “we” as reference to gay men/ gay people or a larger collective, including the reader...
The final image gives due homage to Whitman as “courage-teacher”, and leaves us with the finality of death... our own, and that of our country Whitman had once sung with such celebration. Which bank is smoking? The one of the living or the dead? And we are reminded of the river of forgetfulness, the final word, “Lethe”.
Certainly questions remain: what meanings does Ginsberg ascribe to the lost America of love? And you, the reader?
The next poem by M.C. Allen we read with Elaine reading the regular type, and the rest of us reading the italics as a chorus. The form of the poem could be a collage of two poems, the regular type as one, the italics as another, drawing on Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser”, although not quite. Chilling reminder of the Civil war, but also of the need for healing. Because the poem is a collage, open-ness of interpretation is not limited to a sexualizing of Whitman, but a more general call on his long-lined, confident poetry which can uplift the spirit, and a celebration of writing. Perhaps the threading of what was this way, is a reminder of what continues in the voice of the wounded.
The Dickinson poem uses an economy of meter, rhyme, a breathlessness of dashes which hint at what is not spoken, shifting metaphor, to fully embrace an earthly experience which transports the spirit. We discussed the capitalization of certain nouns, as one does in German, and the hymn-like rhyhms, where the beats alternate from 8 syllables to 6, except for the “tippled” penultimate line. Informed by Emerson, Emily’s introspection brings her to imagine a world of possibilities which leaves the reader to discover. Marcie summed it up as the “Omigod – sex with the air” on one of those days one feel exhilarated by the energy of a beautiful day. Emily spoke of a program in which experts have determined that Emily was quite the lush and “hit the bars of Amherst” at night.
There’s so much more to know about a person – such as the “meaning” of dashes rising up, or slanting down – all we can trust is the poem itself and the clues it provides.
On a personal note, I thoroughly enjoyed writing an essay on this charming poem, and reading other students’ essays as part of the Filreis course.
The Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall” was missing the final line:
“It is Margaret you mourn for” and some of the accent marks.
We agreed that wanwood would be “pale” wood and thought of the physical fall,
(Goldengrove, leafmeal, colder) juxtaposed with the fresh innocence of Margaret—
can one grieve loss in such a state? Perhaps the greatest loss, David suggested implied in the word “blight” is Man’s fall from grace, symbolized by being cast out of the Garden of Eden. We do not grieve that as much as watching a Margaret change from child to suffering adult.
Dorianne’s poem, Cello is a true chef-d’oeuvre. Three sentences, 2 ½ lines , 5 ½ lines, 7 ½ lines long. The lengthening of the lines of the repeated adjectives in “ish”, the accumulative sounds of the “dead music” juxtaposed with the “rosined bow sound of the living”. Like Hopkins’ “heart heard... ghost guessed”, it is up to us to shoulder our losses and departed loved ones.
Kooser’s sonnet, “Porch Swing in September” allows us to admire the detail of a spider’s work in the fulcrum of man-made swing and seasons, wind. The intricacy of each “world” is caught with sounds of wood, “soft vibrations of moths/the wasp tapping....”
I can’t think of a spider at work in morning on her dew-jeweled web without imagining
“time for the cool dewdrops to brush from her work” – each one reflecting both itself, the worlds we don’t usually see, and the web. Perfect imagery without any artifice that captures the sense of the ephemeral without hounding the reader about change.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
poems for September 17
Excerpts fom the Pope in St. Lucia by Laurence Lieberman (p. 38-40 APR)
Writers Writing Dying by C.K. Williams (p. 46, APR)
Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
American Wedding by Joseph Millar
Facts about the Moon -- Dorianne Laux
Don't miss Dorianne's reading at the MAG (part of BOA's wine and dine) 3 pm,
Sunday September 23.
Although we only had excerpts of a very long poem, Lieberman gives us a snapshot of Dunstan St. Omer and refers to the cathedral he prepared for the pope’s visit to St. Lucia,
some refer to as an undertaking as daunting as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I had little knowledge of Carribean culture, aside Derek Walcott’s “Omeros”, nor much knowledge of Lieberman, who says that His goal as poet and traveller is to 'take in my hands, all, all! that I touch! and leave/ no fingerprints. No signature.'
In the small example provided, certainly this is true. We have a snapshot about a situation, and learn something about the man whose hands will restore the peeling murals. Lieberman paints a scene where the artist’s soul wrestles with God – but it is only reading more about St. Omer, that I found out he was the first to paint Christ as a black man, to make him accessible to the West Indian people living Castries.
For more about St. Omer: http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-13/hail-mary-art-dunstan-st-omer.
Lieberman uses a rolling line, which surges like the sea in the “three unveilings”, as it tells the story of the painter, the painting, and what it is to paint the house of God.
The next selection, of CK Williams’ prose poem, Writers Writing Dying engages us with a vernacular wit that makes a serious subject (how we spend our lives before we die) an accessibly interesting subject. The title alone gives pause for thought: Is is writers writing the word “dying”;
writers engaged in producing writing, with an obviated “about” before dying... or perhaps a triumvirate of writers, writing and dying, or any combination thereof? In the opening paragraph, composed of two sentences, Williams employs a dash – followed by a humorous and long commentary on the reaction of a person who died while sleeping which of course, is an exercise in imagination— a projection on the part of the writer, of the position of the now dead person’s voice. I am reminded of the Oliver Herford poem, “The Elf and the Dormouse” where an elf gaily absconds with a mushroom as umbrella, under which a dormouse was protectedly sleeping. “"Where is my toadstool?" loud he lamented.” arrives in the penultimate couplet. see: http://www.bartleby.com/104/28.html (1)
Of course, Williams carries the lament further, with a delightful image of rubber gloves, and human nature idealizing the “way we want to go”.
“and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to hoard for themselves.”
The poem sallies forth, ending on a note like Li Po’s poem about Chuang-zu and the butterfly and the fun of wondering whether one is the man dreaming he becomes a butterfly, or butterfly becoming Chuang-zu at waking.
See poem here: http://www.the-professor-mon.com/general-taoism/PoetryLiPo.html (2)
The ending words, “what for” has the same feel as the “so what” – and Williams ends on a note of celebration for the fun of writing – which is the way we defy dying, which we are doing of course, while living.
Since Williams had referred to writers, coupling Sylvia Plath/Hart Crane, whose suicides deprive us of more stanzas they might have written, the next poem provides a snapshot of Plath’s daughter and husband. We questioned the lines in the second stanza that bridge the cows going home and the exclamation of “moon” by little Frieda: “A dark river of blood, many boulders, /Balancing unspilled milk.” which act rather like a separation between visible (daylight) of familiar (cows) and the not yet that we cannot foresee and the mysterious (moon, which has the sound of a cow, closed by an “n” ).
Joe Millar’s poem is packed with nouns that paint a dancing portrait of a family at a wedding that has nothing static or posed. One adjective that stood out, plangent, has a double edge to its meaning: both loud and reverberating, and expressive, plaintive. It’s dropped in the opening part of the poem like the Yiddish words in the opening line, and the Ketubah that follows. The image “unschooled like a map of the world” works for both the father-observer, and the new couple who have yet to discover what the promise means to them.
Eating, listening, observing, and two stanzas of what their future might entail, (with humorous details that the father knows from experience... ) lead to the final stanza where everything is swallowed whole. The moon isn’t just any moon, but speckled, torn, hinting at the emotion of the father giving away his daughter in marriage. The moonlight, the perfume of the rose on his “worsted” lapel where “worst” and “stead” combine sounds with material all twist like the worsted: yarn or thread spun from combed, stapled wool fibers of the same length. And yes, as reader, one swallows the nuptial wine with confidence, ready to cheer the father about to “dance all night” on this occasion of two families woven together by a wedding.
To repeat the “blurbs”: "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us...Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He knows a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened." -Philip Levine
"Millar can ride a poem into some wildly imaginative territory, and he knows how to sound the blue note at just the right moment. His impulse is to tell a story, but he never forgets, as a poet, to tell it one line at a time." -Billy Collins
In honor of her upcoming reading on Sunday, we closed with “Facts about the Moon” by Dorianne Laux.
The title announces facts, and indeed, it starts with one which points to the impermanence of the moon’s position, and our own. The rhetorical vernacular, “What’s a person supposed to do” in response, allows
the reader to join in the vulnerability of being human, where life is rarely governed by fact.
The collective responsibility of “we” stands out by rejecting the attitude of “don’t worry about that”, and the petulant truth of the speaker’s opinion.
“And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done.”
The “secret pity for the moon” bridges into the empathy we owe anyone in trouble, and the moon turns into troubled mother. This allows the facts about the moon’s role as gravity regulator for oceans and poles, to take on new gravitas, where moon and mother have no choice but to accept the inevitable pull no matter if harboring the undeserving.
Writers Writing Dying by C.K. Williams (p. 46, APR)
Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
American Wedding by Joseph Millar
Facts about the Moon -- Dorianne Laux
Don't miss Dorianne's reading at the MAG (part of BOA's wine and dine) 3 pm,
Sunday September 23.
Although we only had excerpts of a very long poem, Lieberman gives us a snapshot of Dunstan St. Omer and refers to the cathedral he prepared for the pope’s visit to St. Lucia,
some refer to as an undertaking as daunting as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I had little knowledge of Carribean culture, aside Derek Walcott’s “Omeros”, nor much knowledge of Lieberman, who says that His goal as poet and traveller is to 'take in my hands, all, all! that I touch! and leave/ no fingerprints. No signature.'
In the small example provided, certainly this is true. We have a snapshot about a situation, and learn something about the man whose hands will restore the peeling murals. Lieberman paints a scene where the artist’s soul wrestles with God – but it is only reading more about St. Omer, that I found out he was the first to paint Christ as a black man, to make him accessible to the West Indian people living Castries.
For more about St. Omer: http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-13/hail-mary-art-dunstan-st-omer.
Lieberman uses a rolling line, which surges like the sea in the “three unveilings”, as it tells the story of the painter, the painting, and what it is to paint the house of God.
The next selection, of CK Williams’ prose poem, Writers Writing Dying engages us with a vernacular wit that makes a serious subject (how we spend our lives before we die) an accessibly interesting subject. The title alone gives pause for thought: Is is writers writing the word “dying”;
writers engaged in producing writing, with an obviated “about” before dying... or perhaps a triumvirate of writers, writing and dying, or any combination thereof? In the opening paragraph, composed of two sentences, Williams employs a dash – followed by a humorous and long commentary on the reaction of a person who died while sleeping which of course, is an exercise in imagination— a projection on the part of the writer, of the position of the now dead person’s voice. I am reminded of the Oliver Herford poem, “The Elf and the Dormouse” where an elf gaily absconds with a mushroom as umbrella, under which a dormouse was protectedly sleeping. “"Where is my toadstool?" loud he lamented.” arrives in the penultimate couplet. see: http://www.bartleby.com/104/28.html (1)
Of course, Williams carries the lament further, with a delightful image of rubber gloves, and human nature idealizing the “way we want to go”.
“and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to hoard for themselves.”
The poem sallies forth, ending on a note like Li Po’s poem about Chuang-zu and the butterfly and the fun of wondering whether one is the man dreaming he becomes a butterfly, or butterfly becoming Chuang-zu at waking.
See poem here: http://www.the-professor-mon.com/general-taoism/PoetryLiPo.html (2)
The ending words, “what for” has the same feel as the “so what” – and Williams ends on a note of celebration for the fun of writing – which is the way we defy dying, which we are doing of course, while living.
Since Williams had referred to writers, coupling Sylvia Plath/Hart Crane, whose suicides deprive us of more stanzas they might have written, the next poem provides a snapshot of Plath’s daughter and husband. We questioned the lines in the second stanza that bridge the cows going home and the exclamation of “moon” by little Frieda: “A dark river of blood, many boulders, /Balancing unspilled milk.” which act rather like a separation between visible (daylight) of familiar (cows) and the not yet that we cannot foresee and the mysterious (moon, which has the sound of a cow, closed by an “n” ).
Joe Millar’s poem is packed with nouns that paint a dancing portrait of a family at a wedding that has nothing static or posed. One adjective that stood out, plangent, has a double edge to its meaning: both loud and reverberating, and expressive, plaintive. It’s dropped in the opening part of the poem like the Yiddish words in the opening line, and the Ketubah that follows. The image “unschooled like a map of the world” works for both the father-observer, and the new couple who have yet to discover what the promise means to them.
Eating, listening, observing, and two stanzas of what their future might entail, (with humorous details that the father knows from experience... ) lead to the final stanza where everything is swallowed whole. The moon isn’t just any moon, but speckled, torn, hinting at the emotion of the father giving away his daughter in marriage. The moonlight, the perfume of the rose on his “worsted” lapel where “worst” and “stead” combine sounds with material all twist like the worsted: yarn or thread spun from combed, stapled wool fibers of the same length. And yes, as reader, one swallows the nuptial wine with confidence, ready to cheer the father about to “dance all night” on this occasion of two families woven together by a wedding.
To repeat the “blurbs”: "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us...Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He knows a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened." -Philip Levine
"Millar can ride a poem into some wildly imaginative territory, and he knows how to sound the blue note at just the right moment. His impulse is to tell a story, but he never forgets, as a poet, to tell it one line at a time." -Billy Collins
In honor of her upcoming reading on Sunday, we closed with “Facts about the Moon” by Dorianne Laux.
The title announces facts, and indeed, it starts with one which points to the impermanence of the moon’s position, and our own. The rhetorical vernacular, “What’s a person supposed to do” in response, allows
the reader to join in the vulnerability of being human, where life is rarely governed by fact.
The collective responsibility of “we” stands out by rejecting the attitude of “don’t worry about that”, and the petulant truth of the speaker’s opinion.
“And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done.”
The “secret pity for the moon” bridges into the empathy we owe anyone in trouble, and the moon turns into troubled mother. This allows the facts about the moon’s role as gravity regulator for oceans and poles, to take on new gravitas, where moon and mother have no choice but to accept the inevitable pull no matter if harboring the undeserving.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Poems for September 10
Pebble by Zbigniew Herbert
I’ll Explain Some Things by Pablo Neruda
Consolation and the Order of the World by Wright
two poems by Wislawa Szymborska: Everything;
A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth
Somethings, Say the Wise Ones by Mary Oliver
Thursday, August 16, 2012
poems for Aug. 27
Bruegel – by Paul Carroll
War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy
Two poems by Sherman Alexie
Dear Emily Dickinson; Curse #7 (p. 20, APR)
Studying Poetry 3,000 years from Now by Dara Wier (p. 31 APR)
Late Night TV by Dorianne Laux
Maura brought in Billy Collins' poem "Moon" -- reminding me of the power we have to "people our imagination" and not feel so lonely. Hello Moon -- let me introduce to you to a part of me, and put things into perspective. Delightful.
So was the first poem, "Bruegel" filled with vivid imagery (children cough and drop away like loose buttons), cold (magpies/thicken their feathers for the night) and hunger of winter under the endless green sky hanging like "a block of ice above/endless plots of snow, the sense of the precariousness of life, swinging like the sign by the inn, by one hinge. Without going into the suffering of the narrator, the painting of the Hunters by Brueghel reminds us that life was not easy then, much as we might idealize peasants dancing... Brueghel,
as title, is tribute to this genius who could paint "people caught in a breath, the death to come, hidden." Brilliant poem, where, to reference Mark Twain, the "lightening" is at work, not a mere description of lightening bug.
We remembered the uncertainty of Breughel's time... the massacre of the Innocents, the protestant revolt -- and this morning, hearing the massacre of more innocents in Syria... Interesting that Paul Carroll is dancer and lawyer, defending environmental rights... which perhaps are responsible for the hint of stilled movement and justice. into the nested layers. Carroll does not say "who is near the end" -- or who "we" represents linked to the Breughel painting -- but binds us all together with it.
**
Carol Duffy, British poet laureate captures the difficulty of being a war photographer -- how, to witness suffering, and in order to "do the job" be impassive. The etymology is interesting, coming from 1660s, "not feeling pain," the meaning "void of emotions" is from 1690s. Photographic vocabulary is a perfect metaphor -- for instance, the pain arriving in the "development", which Duffy captures: "Solutions slop in trays/beneath his hands which did not tremble then/
though seem to now." The poem goes on switching from war zone to two words: "Rural England. Home again/to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel" -- ordinary pain? The poem veers back to the emerging photo ("Something is happening") recalling the stranger caught in the photograph, the cries of his wife, the blood in the dust.
To juxtapose the "job" with human concerns hits with full force here: A hundred agonies in black-and-white/from which his editor will pick out five or six/
for Sunday's supplement.
The use of rhyme, (must/dust; tears/pre-lunch beers... where/care) reinforces job/feeling disparity.
Rich remembers Brahms Requiem and the lyrics "all grass disappears", and talk came up of the civil war...
Sherman Alexie is a refreshing poet -- able with a sense of humor which yet works like acid to carve out a point. We enjoyed imagining the world of Emily Dickinson, and the civil war, how "God-hungry" is also "God-defying"-- what did she know of what happened in the "greasy grass" oiled by guns, carts, men?
Curse #7, makes you wonder what the other curses are... did he write Curse #1-6?
What a brilliant move to make someone feel both sides where two wrongs have a chance to re-assess what needs to be right...
Dara Wier takes us through odd syntax to read through her lines a few times,
as if in a double-take. We started the discussion speaking of uncertainty, of negative capability... echoes of Auden's "Of suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters" -- but who are the "old Masters" we will remember next century, let alone next in the next millenium...
Dorianne Laux' poem has amazing turns, creating all the spooky "unrest" of late night, insinuating some TV but what is striking is the role of the "I" -- who has the power to make a creepy character disappear -- and then the choice:
" though if I do the darkness / will swallow me, drown me."
It is good to ponder "By what untraceable set of circumstances" the late night character on TV... simultaneously with the idea that
"Somewhere in the universe is a palace/ where each of us is imprinted with a map."
War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy
Two poems by Sherman Alexie
Dear Emily Dickinson; Curse #7 (p. 20, APR)
Studying Poetry 3,000 years from Now by Dara Wier (p. 31 APR)
Late Night TV by Dorianne Laux
Maura brought in Billy Collins' poem "Moon" -- reminding me of the power we have to "people our imagination" and not feel so lonely. Hello Moon -- let me introduce to you to a part of me, and put things into perspective. Delightful.
So was the first poem, "Bruegel" filled with vivid imagery (children cough and drop away like loose buttons), cold (magpies/thicken their feathers for the night) and hunger of winter under the endless green sky hanging like "a block of ice above/endless plots of snow, the sense of the precariousness of life, swinging like the sign by the inn, by one hinge. Without going into the suffering of the narrator, the painting of the Hunters by Brueghel reminds us that life was not easy then, much as we might idealize peasants dancing... Brueghel,
as title, is tribute to this genius who could paint "people caught in a breath, the death to come, hidden." Brilliant poem, where, to reference Mark Twain, the "lightening" is at work, not a mere description of lightening bug.
We remembered the uncertainty of Breughel's time... the massacre of the Innocents, the protestant revolt -- and this morning, hearing the massacre of more innocents in Syria... Interesting that Paul Carroll is dancer and lawyer, defending environmental rights... which perhaps are responsible for the hint of stilled movement and justice. into the nested layers. Carroll does not say "who is near the end" -- or who "we" represents linked to the Breughel painting -- but binds us all together with it.
**
Carol Duffy, British poet laureate captures the difficulty of being a war photographer -- how, to witness suffering, and in order to "do the job" be impassive. The etymology is interesting, coming from 1660s, "not feeling pain," the meaning "void of emotions" is from 1690s. Photographic vocabulary is a perfect metaphor -- for instance, the pain arriving in the "development", which Duffy captures: "Solutions slop in trays/beneath his hands which did not tremble then/
though seem to now." The poem goes on switching from war zone to two words: "Rural England. Home again/to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel" -- ordinary pain? The poem veers back to the emerging photo ("Something is happening") recalling the stranger caught in the photograph, the cries of his wife, the blood in the dust.
To juxtapose the "job" with human concerns hits with full force here: A hundred agonies in black-and-white/from which his editor will pick out five or six/
for Sunday's supplement.
The use of rhyme, (must/dust; tears/pre-lunch beers... where/care) reinforces job/feeling disparity.
Rich remembers Brahms Requiem and the lyrics "all grass disappears", and talk came up of the civil war...
Sherman Alexie is a refreshing poet -- able with a sense of humor which yet works like acid to carve out a point. We enjoyed imagining the world of Emily Dickinson, and the civil war, how "God-hungry" is also "God-defying"-- what did she know of what happened in the "greasy grass" oiled by guns, carts, men?
Curse #7, makes you wonder what the other curses are... did he write Curse #1-6?
What a brilliant move to make someone feel both sides where two wrongs have a chance to re-assess what needs to be right...
Dara Wier takes us through odd syntax to read through her lines a few times,
as if in a double-take. We started the discussion speaking of uncertainty, of negative capability... echoes of Auden's "Of suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters" -- but who are the "old Masters" we will remember next century, let alone next in the next millenium...
Dorianne Laux' poem has amazing turns, creating all the spooky "unrest" of late night, insinuating some TV but what is striking is the role of the "I" -- who has the power to make a creepy character disappear -- and then the choice:
" though if I do the darkness / will swallow me, drown me."
It is good to ponder "By what untraceable set of circumstances" the late night character on TV... simultaneously with the idea that
"Somewhere in the universe is a palace/ where each of us is imprinted with a map."
poems for Aug. 20
Wondrous by Sarah Freligh
Alphabets by Seamus Heaney
Alphabet Poem Skipping Rope by y.t.
two poems for the Olympic games
The Wrestler by Kazim Ali
Lifting by Ouyang Yu
Show and tell: July/Aug. 2012 APR p. 24-28
Four Hundred Men on the Cross
**
The poems today gave a chance to appreciate the weave of life over time through books, past history, the nature of knowledge, memory and the magic of imagination. After the Heaney poem Kathy had mentioned reading Tranströmer’s memoirs. I was reminded me of “Preludes” where Tranströmer says, “Two truths approach each other – one from inside the other from outside and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”
Today’s discussion was like that. Sarah’s poem with the layering of story, the mother, the author of the story, a sort of elegiac math with the image of loss as multiplication, “ every subtraction is exponential”, “how each grief” (followed by line/stanza break...) multiplies the one preceding it. Wondrous as a fitting title for what makes us wonder, as well as the sense of awe of that which cannot be pinned down by fact and number.
I brought up the term, Sprezzatura, translated in various ways as rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, well-practiced naturalness that lies at the center of persuasive discourse of any sort. It suits this poem.
Seamus Heaney’s poem with its range of tones, and times, does feel like a memoir, not of learning letters, or history, or a parading through latinate and anglo-saxon flavors of language, but a tribute to the power of imagination as a coping skill. As Martin said, “we are not genetically built for schools”.
Maura encouraged us to go to the Eastman house to see the alphabet in pictures (Neil Winokur’s “A to Z” portfolio) part of the exhibit “Untold Stories” which is showing until Sept. 16.
The two Olympic games poems brought forth ideas about sports, Olympics, games and much more. The beauty of “wordlifting” as a concept, of being "between the thing and gravity..." as David put it, or perhaps between idea and word... which calls to mind the bicycle series where the actual bicycle has been erased digitally, leaving only a suspended rider and the shadow of the bicycle. http://www.ignant.de/2012/07/17/floating/
Wrestling, from the sheer physicality of it, could also be metaphoric wrestling,
or relating, one person to another, one person to an idea. We ended with Longenbach's Mist Valley, two angles of August – which for a teacher means the last days before resuming school -- but for all of us perhaps, that time when the alphabet is ripe and waiting for harvest before we taste the soup of sounds, sense it makes.
What a wonderful group. So grateful for all the sharing of insights.
Alphabets by Seamus Heaney
Alphabet Poem Skipping Rope by y.t.
two poems for the Olympic games
The Wrestler by Kazim Ali
Lifting by Ouyang Yu
Show and tell: July/Aug. 2012 APR p. 24-28
Four Hundred Men on the Cross
**
The poems today gave a chance to appreciate the weave of life over time through books, past history, the nature of knowledge, memory and the magic of imagination. After the Heaney poem Kathy had mentioned reading Tranströmer’s memoirs. I was reminded me of “Preludes” where Tranströmer says, “Two truths approach each other – one from inside the other from outside and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”
Today’s discussion was like that. Sarah’s poem with the layering of story, the mother, the author of the story, a sort of elegiac math with the image of loss as multiplication, “ every subtraction is exponential”, “how each grief” (followed by line/stanza break...) multiplies the one preceding it. Wondrous as a fitting title for what makes us wonder, as well as the sense of awe of that which cannot be pinned down by fact and number.
I brought up the term, Sprezzatura, translated in various ways as rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, well-practiced naturalness that lies at the center of persuasive discourse of any sort. It suits this poem.
Seamus Heaney’s poem with its range of tones, and times, does feel like a memoir, not of learning letters, or history, or a parading through latinate and anglo-saxon flavors of language, but a tribute to the power of imagination as a coping skill. As Martin said, “we are not genetically built for schools”.
Maura encouraged us to go to the Eastman house to see the alphabet in pictures (Neil Winokur’s “A to Z” portfolio) part of the exhibit “Untold Stories” which is showing until Sept. 16.
The two Olympic games poems brought forth ideas about sports, Olympics, games and much more. The beauty of “wordlifting” as a concept, of being "between the thing and gravity..." as David put it, or perhaps between idea and word... which calls to mind the bicycle series where the actual bicycle has been erased digitally, leaving only a suspended rider and the shadow of the bicycle. http://www.ignant.de/2012/07/17/floating/
Wrestling, from the sheer physicality of it, could also be metaphoric wrestling,
or relating, one person to another, one person to an idea. We ended with Longenbach's Mist Valley, two angles of August – which for a teacher means the last days before resuming school -- but for all of us perhaps, that time when the alphabet is ripe and waiting for harvest before we taste the soup of sounds, sense it makes.
What a wonderful group. So grateful for all the sharing of insights.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Poems for August 13
Poems for August 13
Crossing Over By William Meredith
Only in Things -- W.S. di Piero
A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) – by Jeanine Gailey
I could take -- by Hayden Carruth
After Television – by Hayden Carruth
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis
he first “sunbeam” quote in The Sun, August 2012 issue:
“Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.”
The poems discussed today embraced the difficulty of living with uncertainty, whether as slave crossing the Ohio river on ice floes, navigating through a relationship, or witness to “centuries of egomania”. Meredith takes the ice floe image, separating, enjambing subject/verb as lines leap from couplet to couplet: the “whole river/ “is milling”,
we/ to are going to find new ways of understanding the opening line: “That’s what love is like.” How wonderful to have a line like like, “I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things” taken straight from the passage cited from Uncle Tom, just as is “undulated raft”. As Kathy remarked, the cultural background of the epigram is taken to the personal. The ending couplet starts with an enjambed “anyhow.” What we do in spite of anything? We discussed the role of the fool – the one who is wise enough to be outside of society and point a finger at it. How to learn to deal with our weight (carbon footprint perhaps?) and walk light. Rich cited the new report by Jorgen Randers, Club of Rome, see http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=703
and his forthcoming book, 2052.
Love as an important thread – I can’t remember how Martin arrived at citing the 60 minutes program interviewing Louis Zanparini – how if we do not forgive, we will remain poisoned by what has harmed us.
The 14 line poem Only in Things by di Piero uses nouns with full weight. Swaths of sky; leafage; tailpipes, smokestacks orating sepia exhaust;
nature (pistil) and man-made (mailbox key) rendered as smaller enthusiasms, the whale-gray taken up again by unchanged half-tones yet changing (expressed by wheel, wind-trash, revolving doors). The question: Who can stare at .... and not weep... Our choices: wakefulness or distraction. be woven or dumped into? and into what?
The volta (turn) lands on the 9th line, a fragment. “This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs. Emily wished there were more of the “sun arriving” – Rich remarking that sun is treated as rare, a stranger... and that draws to mind the sacred worship of the sun, sense of holy...
the “rain rushes us” is stopped by a line break, and the enigmatic “love to love”
and further enigmatic stop to stop with a comma before listing what perhaps is in pursuit of us
and what we are becoming. Unsettling.
Back to Meredith, how do we walk light through it?
A poem like Carruth’s “I could take” brings hope. The poem eases into the complexity of an act of sharing (shearing) a leaf, a word, piecing together the two torn edges, unique, raggedy, “imperfections that match”.
Some thought Meredith’s poem would be appropriate for a wedding ceremony. Carruth’s poem, for a celebration of such union on anniversaries!
Just what are we doing with our environment, and how do we love, seem to be parallel threads to living. Jeanine Gailey’s poem, A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) promoted a lively discussion of what we think will help the environment, with some finding it optimistic to use lanterns, seeds, -- build, plant, set things alight in all the senses of the word.
Discussion ranged from wondering at the negligence of government not taking into account what scientists warn...how even science cannot control... and how a poem can transform something so scary it terrifies us, into a thing of beauty and give us hope to keep trying.
“After Television” by Hayden Carruth is fun to analyze by looking at how he handles linebreaks and enjambments – and where not. Discussion revolved around how easily we toss out animals, family, the effect of television can be numbing, but also make us think we can turn on and off any aspect of life. Watching a nature program, we can feel marvel, distress, but that changes nothing in how we relate to nature... The topic of safari clubs providing animals for a fee came up. How, not only are we cut off from animals, our animal nature, but also our literature. TV= pragmatism – but are we willing to accept that as our definition?
We ended by my reading “Mown Lawn” – witty and fun, but driving home an unease.
Ah... poems. Thank you. Poets would be dead without readers
Crossing Over By William Meredith
Only in Things -- W.S. di Piero
A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) – by Jeanine Gailey
I could take -- by Hayden Carruth
After Television – by Hayden Carruth
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis
he first “sunbeam” quote in The Sun, August 2012 issue:
“Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.”
The poems discussed today embraced the difficulty of living with uncertainty, whether as slave crossing the Ohio river on ice floes, navigating through a relationship, or witness to “centuries of egomania”. Meredith takes the ice floe image, separating, enjambing subject/verb as lines leap from couplet to couplet: the “whole river/ “is milling”,
we/ to are going to find new ways of understanding the opening line: “That’s what love is like.” How wonderful to have a line like like, “I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things” taken straight from the passage cited from Uncle Tom, just as is “undulated raft”. As Kathy remarked, the cultural background of the epigram is taken to the personal. The ending couplet starts with an enjambed “anyhow.” What we do in spite of anything? We discussed the role of the fool – the one who is wise enough to be outside of society and point a finger at it. How to learn to deal with our weight (carbon footprint perhaps?) and walk light. Rich cited the new report by Jorgen Randers, Club of Rome, see http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=703
and his forthcoming book, 2052.
Love as an important thread – I can’t remember how Martin arrived at citing the 60 minutes program interviewing Louis Zanparini – how if we do not forgive, we will remain poisoned by what has harmed us.
The 14 line poem Only in Things by di Piero uses nouns with full weight. Swaths of sky; leafage; tailpipes, smokestacks orating sepia exhaust;
nature (pistil) and man-made (mailbox key) rendered as smaller enthusiasms, the whale-gray taken up again by unchanged half-tones yet changing (expressed by wheel, wind-trash, revolving doors). The question: Who can stare at .... and not weep... Our choices: wakefulness or distraction. be woven or dumped into? and into what?
The volta (turn) lands on the 9th line, a fragment. “This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs. Emily wished there were more of the “sun arriving” – Rich remarking that sun is treated as rare, a stranger... and that draws to mind the sacred worship of the sun, sense of holy...
the “rain rushes us” is stopped by a line break, and the enigmatic “love to love”
and further enigmatic stop to stop with a comma before listing what perhaps is in pursuit of us
and what we are becoming. Unsettling.
Back to Meredith, how do we walk light through it?
A poem like Carruth’s “I could take” brings hope. The poem eases into the complexity of an act of sharing (shearing) a leaf, a word, piecing together the two torn edges, unique, raggedy, “imperfections that match”.
Some thought Meredith’s poem would be appropriate for a wedding ceremony. Carruth’s poem, for a celebration of such union on anniversaries!
Just what are we doing with our environment, and how do we love, seem to be parallel threads to living. Jeanine Gailey’s poem, A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) promoted a lively discussion of what we think will help the environment, with some finding it optimistic to use lanterns, seeds, -- build, plant, set things alight in all the senses of the word.
Discussion ranged from wondering at the negligence of government not taking into account what scientists warn...how even science cannot control... and how a poem can transform something so scary it terrifies us, into a thing of beauty and give us hope to keep trying.
“After Television” by Hayden Carruth is fun to analyze by looking at how he handles linebreaks and enjambments – and where not. Discussion revolved around how easily we toss out animals, family, the effect of television can be numbing, but also make us think we can turn on and off any aspect of life. Watching a nature program, we can feel marvel, distress, but that changes nothing in how we relate to nature... The topic of safari clubs providing animals for a fee came up. How, not only are we cut off from animals, our animal nature, but also our literature. TV= pragmatism – but are we willing to accept that as our definition?
We ended by my reading “Mown Lawn” – witty and fun, but driving home an unease.
Ah... poems. Thank you. Poets would be dead without readers
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Poems for August 6
Poems for August 6
“A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” Paul Valéry
Kim Addonizio puts it this way: “Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive."
What sort of “poetic state” do these poems produce in you? How do they heighten the engagement with being alive?
Best wishes,
Kitty
Tree Marriage – William Meredith
Waiting – W.S. Merwin
Creek by Kwame Dawes
Serenade -- Virginia Konchan
it may not always be so; and i say by E.E. Cummings
Gulls by Wm Carlos Williams
**
Wonderful discussion... about connections, expectations, stages of growth that allow us to transform, accept, transcend.... with so many different "takes" and shared experiences.
Note: the Cummings is a rhymed sonnet -- One person thought it was "disingenuous" --
He has worked the form, without being trite, and gone to
a depth of love few can achieve.
That one bird... Terribly afar can be both acceptance of loss, opening to
the what is next, and feeling what was draw further away -- I think of the
French "terrible" -- as not horrific, but intensely great, almost God-like.
“A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” Paul Valéry
Kim Addonizio puts it this way: “Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive."
What sort of “poetic state” do these poems produce in you? How do they heighten the engagement with being alive?
Best wishes,
Kitty
Tree Marriage – William Meredith
Waiting – W.S. Merwin
Creek by Kwame Dawes
Serenade -- Virginia Konchan
it may not always be so; and i say by E.E. Cummings
Gulls by Wm Carlos Williams
**
Wonderful discussion... about connections, expectations, stages of growth that allow us to transform, accept, transcend.... with so many different "takes" and shared experiences.
Note: the Cummings is a rhymed sonnet -- One person thought it was "disingenuous" --
He has worked the form, without being trite, and gone to
a depth of love few can achieve.
That one bird... Terribly afar can be both acceptance of loss, opening to
the what is next, and feeling what was draw further away -- I think of the
French "terrible" -- as not horrific, but intensely great, almost God-like.
comments on July 30 poems taken from June 2012 Poetry Magazine
“Chi cerca la vita, trova lo stile; chi cerca lo stile, trova la morte.”
Italian poet Eduardo De Filippo
(English translation: Searching for life, one finds form; searching for form, one finds death.”)
Today was a day of synchronicity... stumbling on the above quotation-- and then what
"Vermeer termed “dead coloring” or “underpainting” (a technique pioneered by Titian (arguably the most influential Italian painter of the High Renaissance) and frequently employed by Flemish painters, as a means of creating a layered effect on a canvas." -- which suited the poems by W.S. di Piero about art: Cezanne, a shoe box and Vermeer.
The 11 line "On a painting by Cezanne" evokes still life objects --the first 3 lines layer adjectives to stone, the pear, and doubles nouns of bread hills, tablecloth snowfall. The next two lines leap into the powerful image "The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone,SNARLS a mountainside into lavendar and green." A single line about the viewer, "In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all." then another two lines about the elements, and the final three lines where the INVISIBLE is copied... "to improvise the soul of things and remake solid life into fresh anxious unlifelike form."
How to talk about this poem without quoting each line to show how with words, di Piero creates the paradox of "Nature Morte" -- the living stilled in death -- that "anxious" uncertain vibrancy of new, coupled with the opposite.
The three poems, taken from Poetry's June 2012 issue which coupled di Piero's poems with his essays from "City Dog" gave us some insight into the mind of the poet --
and his family: "The voices of my world were not tender and unquestioning". Snarl returns, "Everyone around me, it seemed, spoke in the brittle, pugnacious tones I still hear when my own voice comes snarling out of its vinegary corner." In a way,
objects in a still life become like family circumstances" filled with "extremity of unease and rage" I see in the energy of Cezanne's brush
(Although Martin referred to his Mont Ste. Victoire as peaceful... I find it unsettling.)
What we discovered in these poems, was perhaps related di Filipo's search for meaning, especially in "The Shoe box" a sort of collection of life-blood in memory, contained in rhymed, sonnet form. The rich texture of the diction (opening line: A high school mash note’s stammering lust),"snapshot glare" and the "loose joinery" of the first sentence, looped in five lines, then moves to dreamspeak to a colon marking the Volta. New sounds... "a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves,
fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes." bridge to "things" which turn out to be abstract, wish, desire -- all that lies in the thin veil between life and death...
ending with what we pack into our own bag of collected, protected items: fear.
The Girl with the Pearl Earring is a one sentence, "thin" column which starts with a painting, a blends into the here and now of a contemporary pierced girl. The discussion veered into what we see and judge... but as di Piero says in his essays, what counts to him is the "signature form (of) feeling. Then just about any line or stanza or phrase will enact in miniature the weave of the entire poem,
"unconscious squawks through the finer tones of consciousness." as in his final 4 lines: pearls not sea-harvested
but imagined seen put there
by a certain need and fancy
because love says it’s so
picture that picture this.
The hinge of "so" -- emphasizes the picture, but also refers to how love determines the way we imagine...
Levertov's "invocation" has a prayer like feel with a great wish for the protection of what we cherish, value, the calling on the Lares, or Roman household deities... The language allows for multiple understandings of both fear and hope in the second (final) stanza:
Deep snow shall block all entrances
and oppress the roof and darken
the windows. O Lares,
don’t leave.
The house yawns like a bear.
Guard its profound dreams for us,
that it return to us when we return.
Dove's November beginnings, works a magical music in the sounds of each of the 3 stanzas... one person wanted "zephyrs" instead of zithers at the end, to keep the wind image -- but the sound is far more effective. Winter... and aching in secret...with a tongue-in-cheek way of passing the dark times (memorizing a gloomy line or two of German) but promising to play the fool in Spring...
Although the discussion went in many directions, it was a satisfying romp through a small sample of June 2012, Poetry.
Italian poet Eduardo De Filippo
(English translation: Searching for life, one finds form; searching for form, one finds death.”)
Today was a day of synchronicity... stumbling on the above quotation-- and then what
"Vermeer termed “dead coloring” or “underpainting” (a technique pioneered by Titian (arguably the most influential Italian painter of the High Renaissance) and frequently employed by Flemish painters, as a means of creating a layered effect on a canvas." -- which suited the poems by W.S. di Piero about art: Cezanne, a shoe box and Vermeer.
The 11 line "On a painting by Cezanne" evokes still life objects --the first 3 lines layer adjectives to stone, the pear, and doubles nouns of bread hills, tablecloth snowfall. The next two lines leap into the powerful image "The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone,SNARLS a mountainside into lavendar and green." A single line about the viewer, "In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all." then another two lines about the elements, and the final three lines where the INVISIBLE is copied... "to improvise the soul of things and remake solid life into fresh anxious unlifelike form."
How to talk about this poem without quoting each line to show how with words, di Piero creates the paradox of "Nature Morte" -- the living stilled in death -- that "anxious" uncertain vibrancy of new, coupled with the opposite.
The three poems, taken from Poetry's June 2012 issue which coupled di Piero's poems with his essays from "City Dog" gave us some insight into the mind of the poet --
and his family: "The voices of my world were not tender and unquestioning". Snarl returns, "Everyone around me, it seemed, spoke in the brittle, pugnacious tones I still hear when my own voice comes snarling out of its vinegary corner." In a way,
objects in a still life become like family circumstances" filled with "extremity of unease and rage" I see in the energy of Cezanne's brush
(Although Martin referred to his Mont Ste. Victoire as peaceful... I find it unsettling.)
What we discovered in these poems, was perhaps related di Filipo's search for meaning, especially in "The Shoe box" a sort of collection of life-blood in memory, contained in rhymed, sonnet form. The rich texture of the diction (opening line: A high school mash note’s stammering lust),"snapshot glare" and the "loose joinery" of the first sentence, looped in five lines, then moves to dreamspeak to a colon marking the Volta. New sounds... "a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves,
fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes." bridge to "things" which turn out to be abstract, wish, desire -- all that lies in the thin veil between life and death...
ending with what we pack into our own bag of collected, protected items: fear.
The Girl with the Pearl Earring is a one sentence, "thin" column which starts with a painting, a blends into the here and now of a contemporary pierced girl. The discussion veered into what we see and judge... but as di Piero says in his essays, what counts to him is the "signature form (of) feeling. Then just about any line or stanza or phrase will enact in miniature the weave of the entire poem,
"unconscious squawks through the finer tones of consciousness." as in his final 4 lines: pearls not sea-harvested
but imagined seen put there
by a certain need and fancy
because love says it’s so
picture that picture this.
The hinge of "so" -- emphasizes the picture, but also refers to how love determines the way we imagine...
Levertov's "invocation" has a prayer like feel with a great wish for the protection of what we cherish, value, the calling on the Lares, or Roman household deities... The language allows for multiple understandings of both fear and hope in the second (final) stanza:
Deep snow shall block all entrances
and oppress the roof and darken
the windows. O Lares,
don’t leave.
The house yawns like a bear.
Guard its profound dreams for us,
that it return to us when we return.
Dove's November beginnings, works a magical music in the sounds of each of the 3 stanzas... one person wanted "zephyrs" instead of zithers at the end, to keep the wind image -- but the sound is far more effective. Winter... and aching in secret...with a tongue-in-cheek way of passing the dark times (memorizing a gloomy line or two of German) but promising to play the fool in Spring...
Although the discussion went in many directions, it was a satisfying romp through a small sample of June 2012, Poetry.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Poems for July 30
Poems for July 30 ( A peek at Ekphrasis – “Vivid Description of a thing” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5918)
“What does it mean to engage directly with the world – look at the world surrounding you—and “repurposing of language”, take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising.” from Naomi Beckwith p. 267, Poetry, June 2012
Invocation – Denise Levertov
November for Beginners- Rita Dove
3 poems by W.S. Di Piero
On a Picture by Cézanne
The Shoe Box
Girl with Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer
"Poet on a Mountaintop" by Shen Chou:( 1427–1509, painter in Ming dynasty, not to be confused by another Shen Chou, artist in 19th c.) http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc100/Art11.html “First you make a bow to the landscape. Then you wait, and if the landscape bows to you, then and not until then can you paint the landscape.” John Marin, 1928.
The Chinese characters in the painting are translated this way:
White clouds sash-like
wrap mountain waists,
The rock terrace flies in space,
distant, a narrow path.
Leaning on a bramble staff,
far and free I gaze,
To the warble of valley brook
I reply with the cry of my flute.
from p. 11 of http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc100/Art12.html
“What does it mean to engage directly with the world – look at the world surrounding you—and “repurposing of language”, take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising.” from Naomi Beckwith p. 267, Poetry, June 2012
Invocation – Denise Levertov
November for Beginners- Rita Dove
3 poems by W.S. Di Piero
On a Picture by Cézanne
The Shoe Box
Girl with Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer
"Poet on a Mountaintop" by Shen Chou:( 1427–1509, painter in Ming dynasty, not to be confused by another Shen Chou, artist in 19th c.) http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc100/Art11.html “First you make a bow to the landscape. Then you wait, and if the landscape bows to you, then and not until then can you paint the landscape.” John Marin, 1928.
The Chinese characters in the painting are translated this way:
White clouds sash-like
wrap mountain waists,
The rock terrace flies in space,
distant, a narrow path.
Leaning on a bramble staff,
far and free I gaze,
To the warble of valley brook
I reply with the cry of my flute.
from p. 11 of http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc100/Art12.html
Monday, July 16, 2012
Poems for July 23
Poems for July 23
Slur by Jacek Gutorow
To The Field Of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried By The New Wing Of The Mall by Lucia Perillo
Brendel Playing Schubert by Lisel Mueller
Fevers of a Minor Fire by Sandra Longhorn
New England Weather by Archibald MacLeish
Not the End of the World by Paul Hostovsky
Gutorow captures the land of not-quite/almost/inbetween. Applying the idea of boundaries to a musical slur, that softening of an accent, what links one note to the next, the poem explores the impermanence of time, supported by an elasticity in the 13 uneven lines.
Kathy shared a quotation about Lucia Perillo -- "hopefulness, not luck, fought for tooth and claw" -- hope is not that thing with feathers, but something gritty to face face manmade devastation... "helicopters chewing the linings of clouds above clear-cuts". How do we live our lives? Shrug our shoulders, rest in our habits? And even how are we "defibrillated" and to what end? Marvellously strong language that challenges...
Mueller challenges our instant reaction to applaud after keeping inside our emotions for hours... as if we cannot stay "where the enchanted live" -- without talking about
our guardian selves" there is yet this idea that we would be better off in a state
of receptive gratitude, rather than the absurd noise that jerks us away from the magic of a live performance.
Sandra Longhorn's poem has an eerie primal quality about this relationship between "Madame" and the subservient, offset by what seems to be a humorous tongue-in-cheekness -- the calloused tongue, lumbering; a little vampirish in the "neck ravaged" (based on your favored advice) and "pilfered blood" and red meat; What is this feral oath-- waiting to erupt as if inspired to speak by the spirit at a Quaker meeting? or truly UNholy?
What needs saying -- and who is in charge of ourselves -- some wildness? some consciousness that chooses the diabolic? In reading the author's blog, the inspiration draws from Lucy Brock-Broido and Emily Dickinson... and when spoken outloud, what strikes the ear are images which stand out in a bath of sound -- perhaps indeed, a very hot day, the return of inspiration, and a lonely writer,
addressing her muse.
A welcome relief then, to slip into the comfortable New England vernacular,
and talk about "summer weather..." where they'll be thunder for sure... although,
of course, the link to Sumner Boyden, buried in the New Hampshire cemetery, which brings the subject around to death, our time and place for it.
We ran out of time to discuss "Not the end of the World" -- for next week!
Slur by Jacek Gutorow
To The Field Of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried By The New Wing Of The Mall by Lucia Perillo
Brendel Playing Schubert by Lisel Mueller
Fevers of a Minor Fire by Sandra Longhorn
New England Weather by Archibald MacLeish
Not the End of the World by Paul Hostovsky
Gutorow captures the land of not-quite/almost/inbetween. Applying the idea of boundaries to a musical slur, that softening of an accent, what links one note to the next, the poem explores the impermanence of time, supported by an elasticity in the 13 uneven lines.
Kathy shared a quotation about Lucia Perillo -- "hopefulness, not luck, fought for tooth and claw" -- hope is not that thing with feathers, but something gritty to face face manmade devastation... "helicopters chewing the linings of clouds above clear-cuts". How do we live our lives? Shrug our shoulders, rest in our habits? And even how are we "defibrillated" and to what end? Marvellously strong language that challenges...
Mueller challenges our instant reaction to applaud after keeping inside our emotions for hours... as if we cannot stay "where the enchanted live" -- without talking about
our guardian selves" there is yet this idea that we would be better off in a state
of receptive gratitude, rather than the absurd noise that jerks us away from the magic of a live performance.
Sandra Longhorn's poem has an eerie primal quality about this relationship between "Madame" and the subservient, offset by what seems to be a humorous tongue-in-cheekness -- the calloused tongue, lumbering; a little vampirish in the "neck ravaged" (based on your favored advice) and "pilfered blood" and red meat; What is this feral oath-- waiting to erupt as if inspired to speak by the spirit at a Quaker meeting? or truly UNholy?
What needs saying -- and who is in charge of ourselves -- some wildness? some consciousness that chooses the diabolic? In reading the author's blog, the inspiration draws from Lucy Brock-Broido and Emily Dickinson... and when spoken outloud, what strikes the ear are images which stand out in a bath of sound -- perhaps indeed, a very hot day, the return of inspiration, and a lonely writer,
addressing her muse.
A welcome relief then, to slip into the comfortable New England vernacular,
and talk about "summer weather..." where they'll be thunder for sure... although,
of course, the link to Sumner Boyden, buried in the New Hampshire cemetery, which brings the subject around to death, our time and place for it.
We ran out of time to discuss "Not the end of the World" -- for next week!
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